Redemption
by HarunaRei
Summary: Megaman Classic/Zero crossover: Neo Arcadia has gone to hell in a handbasket. The city is slipping, Copy X has lost his mind, the Guardians are completely duped, and someone rudely awakened the Robot Masters from their centuries-long stasis.
1. Awakening

_Alright, so, this is a cooperative effort between myself and Midnyght Saber (midnyght saber dot weebly dot com), and we'd like to begin by apologizing. Because this fic? Is long. It is very, very long and while I'm sure no one here will complain, well, don't say we didn't warn you. There is a huge gap between Classic and X series, as I am certain you've observed: everyone in Classic, even the long-lived Robot Masters, somehow managed to die off in the century between the two. I never liked this. But this does create a lot of fun crossover potential. So here, while Neo Arcadia slowly slides down the slippery slope to complete hell on Earth, they make an unexpected discovery on the other side of the planet. Considering the major loss of technology overall between Classic and X, and the limited improvement in Zero due to constant warfare, and considering what the Robot Masters could do? Well, read and you'll see._

_Disclaimer: Rockman and all related characters and the like are property of Capcom, we are making no profit._

* * *

><p>The energy reading was tremendous. It was a focused reading, not broad and spotty like what they were used to seeing. But the power level was like nothing they'd seen before this. It pumped out energy and flooded their sensors like a floodlight in the dead of night.<p>

Naturally, a crew was immediately dispatched. What that kind of energy could do for Neo Arcadia, especially if they could replicate it and sustain it? Unprecedented.

They pinpointed the location fairly easily: with a beacon like that, the real question was, how had they missed that before?

That wasn't the only surprise: upon closer examination, they discovered that the source was relatively near the surface, in a hollow.

The hollow was the remnants of an ancient lab, and in that lab, they found two deactivated Reploids. The energy reading was coming from one of them. But to find such ancient models…

Both were packed up and shipped back to Neo Arcadia for immediate examination.

* * *

><p>"Okay, be careful with those bodies, we don't need them to fall apart on us after all the trouble we went through to get them here," the foreman ordered.<p>

"Right, right, keep your hat on!" the grunt mumbled, hauling the body of the still-active machine onto an exam table and holding up a battered-looking shield. "So what do I do with this? Looks like it goes to the red one, but…"

"For now?" The foreman scratched his head, unsure about the workmanship of the item. "Keep it with the rest of him. We'll analyze it and if it's still any good, he can have it back, I guess."

The door to the archaeology lab slid open with a quiet hiss, Harpuia and Phantom quickly stepping into the room, the aerial Guardian's jade eyes flitting over the two forms on the tables. "I heard word from transport that your crew had docked. I take it you found something of interest if you're back a week ahead of schedule?"

The foreman snapped a quick salute at the two Guardians. "Yes, sir, we have a pair of old model…Reploids…and I use the term loosely. One of them appears to still be active."

Harpuia looked over the taller of the two models, noting the energy readings that were showing up on the nearby screen. "Any idea how something as theoretically old as these two would still be operating?" Eyes flicked to the smaller of the two, eyeing the remains of the light blue armor with a mixture of recognition and confusion. "Phantom, I believe Master X would be most interested in this discovery, even with all of our current evidence regarding their age being purely hypothetical. Please inform him that I am making a formal request for his presence and that I apologize for interrupting whatever is on his schedule at present."

"At once." And as silently as he had arrived, Phantom disappeared into the halls beyond.

The foreman cleared his throat. "So, should we wait before beginning the analysis, or should we have some preliminary results in for when Master X gets here?"

Emotionless green eyes locked on the foreman of the archaeology crew for a moment. "Start the analysis now so that we have less of a reason for Master X to be irate at being pulled from his duties. Where were these units found?"

The foreman signaled for the analysis team to begin their task as he responded, "We found them in an abandoned lab in a cave system in a Canadian mountain range. Considering the signal we got from the red one, it's a wonder we didn't find these two sooner."

"I take that to mean that the signal was…" Harpuia stopped, the foreman's words finally registering, and he practically glared daggers at the poor Reploid. "You weren't even assigned near Canadian territory. You're honestly telling me that this robot was sending off an energy reading strong enough to get your attention and we've never noticed this before?" With an agitated sigh, Harpuia opened a peripheral message window and sent the team's findings and information to Fefnir with an addendum to have a 'talk' with the tech crew that managed the city's energy supplies for missing something that could prove immensely vital to the city's survival.

"I want you and the rest of your crew to compile a report on these findings, including all of your AV logs from the dig site. The analysts can take it from here, so get moving." Harpuia's glare turned from the foreman to the screen near the red unit, watching the minute fluctuations in the energy readings.

"We will have the full report to you within the hour." The foreman turned to address his dig crew. "Debrief in five! It's for Harpuia, so move your dusty asses!" He then gave the Wind Guardian a quick bow before rushing out of the room.

* * *

><p>Copy X was probably one of only a handful of individuals that could actually tell when Phantom entered a room, waving a hand to dismiss the Judges before turning to face the shadow Guardian. "There had better be a good reason for walking in on a Council session unannounced, Phantom."<p>

Phantom knelt in reverence and spoke, "There was a find. Possibly progenitor, definitely old. And powerful."

Copy X stiffened at this. While a copy of the X everyone, the Guardians included, thought him to be, there was nothing he knew, no memories saved or backed up, of these progenitor models save for the discussions that occasionally bounced around in the tech and research divisions of Neo Arcadia's staff. He straightened a bit more, crimson eyes locking on the Reploid. "Powerful how? Was the crew harmed?" Copy X began walking, knowing that Phantom would fall in step behind him. "Where are they keeping them now?"

"No one was harmed, but there is great potential in the active one. They are both in the lab in the archaeologist's wing of the tower, possibly under analysis." Phantom's silent steps fell in line with Copy X's and he frowned slightly. "Correction - the core is active in one of them, but as far as I saw, there was no sign of life in either of them."

Copy X quickened his pace, trying to hide the fact that he had no idea what he was supposed to do when they finally arrived at the lab. An active core meant that the Reploid was powered by something far more potent than the electricity and Energen Crystals that sustained them, the question being, of course, what? What could possibly be that powerful? "Has any mention been made of where they were found?"

Perhaps stumbling upon these units would lead to new Energen Crystal mines. The Judges had already found themselves forced to increase the number of Maverick charges levied against the Reploid populace just to keep the city's energy reserves from being depleted faster than they already were. Copy X could only hope for the best in this case.

Phantom shook his head. "Perhaps, but I was not there to hear it if they said where. I came to summon you immediately."

The two continued to walk in silence, the soft thud of Copy X's bootfalls completely masking what little sound Phantom made while he moved. As they finally reached the lab, Harpuia's voice echoed out of the room as the door slid open, and Copy X frowned at the question.

"Is he awake?" Harpuia asked one of the scientists. "His core reading keeps fluctuating."

The lead analyst never looked up from the screen, completely absorbed in the data streaming across it. "Even with the ridiculous amount of energy in the core, it seems he will be stuck in sleep mode for the time being. His body is too badly damaged. Also, I should mention that the other one seems to run on solar energy, but that body is even worse off. We've got the body under some UV lamps now to see if we can get a reaction, but…"

The Guardian's face screwed into a mask of derisive confusion. If either of these units had two kilobytes of sense somewhere in their processors, the smaller unit should not have been in a cave for any extent of time. "If that unit runs on a photovoltaic conversion core, why were they in a cave? Wouldn't the restricted access to sunlight have been a death sentence?" Footsteps behind him alerted Harpuia to the new presence in the room, the Guardian turning and quickly bowing to Copy X. "Master X," he intoned respectfully, "my humblest apologies once more for disturbing you for this matter, but I felt it important for you to see these units yourself."

Copy X let his eyes flit over the units, looking at the taller for a moment. "You say his core is providing such high energy readings. Has anyone bothered to link him into the network and see what _exactly_ it is that's powering him?" A vicious glare passed over all the Reploids in the room, all but the Guardians shirking from Copy X's malicious gaze.

The lead analyst bowed quickly, signaling to the analytical crew as he answered, "Many apologies, Master X, we have been running a system check all this time to make sure the Reploid would be compatible with our network, not to mention making sure that there were no viruses or such within the system. Progress has been slow because of—"

Phantom raised a hand and shot the researcher a withering glare. "Enough. Proceed."

Copy X nodded slightly towards the Guardian before returning his attention to the tech crew. "I did not come all the way down here for a group of self-righteous piles of scrap metal to give me empty excuses about why they are not doing the jobs they are assigned to, especially with this unit sitting there with a power core that could run this city for _months_, if not longer." Looking at the robot once more, Copy X stopped for a moment, moving past Harpuia and the analyst to approach the smaller of the two robots. Something about this unit seemed familiar, seemed as if he should have _known_ him. Moving closer and pushing the UV lamps aside to get a better look at the unit's face, Copy X had to restrain a startled gasp. Though not a perfect copy, this model looked far too similar to the face that reflected from the mirror in his chambers. "What are the plans for these units?"

The lead analyst scratched the side of his face, having been caught off-guard by the question. "We're finally starting to get a reaction from the blue one, but it's still minor. We've considered taking the body out into direct sunlight to see if we can get something useful, especially since we could definitely use the photovoltaic system if it proves viable." The tech crew was busy hooking wires from various ports on the red unit's neck to a wide range of devices arranged around the table as the lead spoke to Copy X, all the while trying to avoid the gazes of the Guardians and Master in the room with them. "We would need quite a few resources to rebuild them both, however."

Copy X had to struggle to keep his features neutral as he looked down at the blue unit. "Are the materials compatible between the two units?"

Harpuia turned to look at Copy X, shock evident on his face. "Master X, are you suggesting…?"

Phantom kept silent, his face a mask of impassiveness, but even he was shocked at Master X's idea. Surely he could see the resemblance…?

The lead analyst began to fidget more nervously now, unsure how to answer. "Well, I _suppose_ that they could have some interchangeable parts, but with the vastly different power systems, I have no clue as to whether or not the pieces will really work with one another. Not to mention the historic value! I mean, this is likely your—"

"Still you shove excuses at me," Copy X said, his tone low and menacing as he cut the analyst off. "You have already said that it will take a great deal of resources to rebuild these units. This one," he said, motioning to the blue unit, "requires far more work and is showing little to no improvement, even with the UV exposure. The other likely needs just as much work, but for now, we need his body repaired and maintained to ensure that his core remains in optimal condition." Glaring at the blue unit, Copy X's voice seemed to drip with venom, "Scrap this unit. Gut him for parts to repair the other. Send his solar core down to the research division and let them go over it, see if it can be applied as a short-term solution for the city." He stopped for a moment, ensuring that the lead analyst kept his head down, eyes averted. "Now, either you get to work repairing the unit as I have instructed or I will have the Judges mark you as Maverick for placing the 'historic' value of a robot over the health and continued well-being of Neo Arcadia's human populace. Have I made myself _clear_?"

The lead analyst merely nodded, too terrified to dare utter another word. He waved the tech crew over to the blue unit and motioned for them to begin their grim work before leaving the lab, sick at heart over choosing his life over someone else's, especially when the unit was worth so much more than just spare parts.

* * *

><p>Awareness, for the first time in <em>centuries<em>. Except that it was—ah, his body. Disrepair didn't even begin to cover it. What—what was this?

Within milliseconds of being plugged in, he was on the network. The security was a joke: were they trying to keep humans out and no one else? There were firewalls: he swatted them aside, slipped through them, and placed them back before an alarm could even be processed. No, he was supposed to be here. As far as the network was concerned, an administrator had just logged in, so there was nothing strange about security settings being changed, being updated.

The computers in the room his body were being kept in had microphones and there were cameras, so he was able to watch and listen via a different route. Aha, that's better.

He spread out over the network, looking things over—what the hell were they doing with their power grid? Wasteful; Elec Man would be ashamed to see this. Didn't they have the data that had been left behind, at least?

At the same time, he looked around the room his body was in, and stopped.

There were…androids in the room. No humans whatsoever. And on two tables were he and Rock.

And one that looked like X was asking whether their parts were cross-compatible.

He actually froze his analyses of the city's network at that question.

Because between the two of them, Rock was in a more advanced state of disrepair.

He tightened his grip on the power grid but allowed everything to run as it had been, simply slipped into the system, reaching outward, getting what data he could.

He needed to get Rock out of there. With his body disabled, he'd have to…

If he'd been able to move, his eyes would have narrowed.

He watched: there was nothing else to be done at the moment. He watched as they opened Rock up and evaluated his condition. He watched as they opened his own body up and began removing the parts that were causing all of his red indicator lights. They hadn't even realized he was online. Of course, altering what the screen was showing them to make him appear inactive was simple. It was unbelievable that the entire city was connected to one network, including this computer network. Didn't they realize that everything would come toppling down with the right kind of tug?

Or were their programmers that incompetent? It was true that men like Light and Wily come once in a millennium, but security systems more sophisticated than this one were a dime a dozen in the 21st century.

No, he should give them credit where it was due: it would be a halfway decent system if not for this one massively fatal flaw. Hadn't they heard not to place all of their eggs into one basket?

All the better for him, and for Rock.

So long as they didn't do something irreversible. So long as they only took the _replaceable _parts from him.

For their own sake, they better. He wouldn't be held responsible for this city otherwise.

As they worked, he pulled up information about the identities of the androids—Reploids—in the room. Reploids—ah, replicas of X. Or rather, derived from X's technology. There was no information on Robot Masters in the database. None whatsoever.

Interesting.

X was the ruler of this city, and it appeared to be the only city left, or at least, the only large one with any semblance of law. The two in the room were…Sage Harpuia and Hidden Phantom. Derived more directly from X. His progeny, then?

And they were all standing here, watching as Rock was _dissected_?

It was fortunate that Blues' capability to give a damn about them was made nonexistent. It would be a pity if he had any inner turmoil about 'family' doing this to one another.

He'd seen what 'family' could do when they wanted control. This shouldn't surprise him, even if they were robots, androids, even if their reasoning shouldn't be so _glitchy_.

The hours crept along: he needed to be completely restored to look even remotely respectable and, he noticed, the ones left to the task of restoring him were treating his body a bit like a religious relic. It reminded him of watching human religious rituals, how they associated certain relics with events or traits and then honored the items.

They'd stripped the armor off of both Rock and himself—they were both in their bodysuits now—and they were pulling workable parts out of Rock and replacing various things in his own body. They were even using portions of Rock's buster to repair his own.

They were fools for arming him.

He needed new skin and hair and by what they were saying, his armor would have to be remade elsewhere. There was talk of bringing him online and how they didn't want him to be upset for being half-inoperational when he woke. They clearly would have liked the opportunity to work on Rock, but apparently X's word is law in this place, even when the android was completely out of line.

These 'Reploids' were behaving just like humans, meekly obeying orders when it was clear that X was an incompetent master. The android clearly needed some serious debugging. He needed to be thrown back into his capsule until it drove some sense into his processor.

So, he supposed, they'd wake him up and expect him to be, what, grateful that they'd killed his scion so he could sit up? Grateful that they'd _cannibalized_ Rock so that he wouldn't have to feel self-conscious upon waking?

It was certainly a good thing that they'd been kind enough to restore his buster.

* * *

><p>Once the tech crew had started moving at a pace that didn't upset Copy X, he had turned and left the lab, heading for his chambers. The Council would not reconvene until the next morning, courtesy of Phantom's impromptu disruption. No matter, though. The Judges had been discussing the energy crisis and how a few of them were uncomfortable labeling Reploids as Mavericks simply for having higher energy consumption rates. It targeted a number of the larger models in the defense force, something that could be seen as showing bias if it was realized that individuals like Fefnir and Judge Kelverian were exempt from the legislation.<p>

At present, however, Copy X could see no other course of action.

As much as it bothered him that he was basically committing an act of focused genocide against his own race, wasn't it part of his programming that the humans were more essential, more important to protect? What were a few Reploid lives against the shattered remnants of the human population, even if Copy X had no record in his memory files of _why_ the population levels were so insanely low.

Despite the Reploid's otherwise stoic expression, Copy X could tell that Phantom had been exceedingly upset with the decision to use the parts from one of the robots to repair the other. As strained as their resources were, even though neither seemed to require Neo Arcadia's energy to remain operational, couldn't Phantom understand that it was done because of the situation the city found itself in? Or had Phantom seen deeper, understood the core reason why the model that looked so eerily like him had to be destroyed?

As he walked silently behind Copy X, Phantom kept his face as neutral as possible while he addressed his leader, lest Copy X be able to somehow sense his feelings without even having to face him. "Master X, if I may be so bold, what do you truly intend to do with the blue unit's solar core? Might it still prove useful if a way to awaken it can be discerned?" Although he told himself he was prepared for the answer, he could not help but feel a wave of disgust threatening to wash over him should he be correct in his assumption.

Copy X stopped for a moment, looking back at the Guardian. "Don't tell me that you are as caught up in this foolishness regarding our history as the rest of the laboratory crew? I thought you of all would have more sense than to get caught up in ridiculous fancies such as theirs. History is history. We cannot change what has happened, and relics of the past are not as important as those alive _now_. All we can do is utilize that which we have here and now to try and make something of what's left of this burned-out husk of a world." Facing forward again, Copy X continued toward the far end of the hallway and the lift that would take him to his chambers and the charging pod waiting there for him.

"As far as that blue robot is concerned, it serves us as nothing more than parts for the other model and as a possible stop-gap, if not solution, to the energy crisis. Considering it has a solar core, we may yet find use for the system, but several modifications will likely be needed. However old it is, the environment it is from is not the environment of our world as it is." A wireless signal to the lift started one of the cars down the shaft. "Is there anywhere you must be getting to, General, or could I have a moment more of your time?"

Phantom considered returning to his duties, but decided that this was a much more pressing matter. He had stood by while the Judges decided the fates of countless Reploids across Neo Arcadia, remained silent while life after life was taken in order to preserve the city; desperate measures that only slowed the progress of the energy crisis with no solution in sight, nor one in development. Now, here were_two_ solutions in front of them, seemingly gift wrapped for them to use as they saw fit, and Master X was willing to simply throw one away in favor of the other. Had so many years of being forced to take the heart of one and give it to another left him so blind? And worse…the other concern had to be voice, needed to be said, if nothing else.

The lift toned softly as it arrived, Copy X stepping on and waiting for Phantom to join him. The Zan'ei General hesitated for only a short moment before joining him, his resolve to voice his concerns conflicting with his sworn allegiance to his master. Copy X signaled for the lift to take them to his chambers, and for a moment that seemed to stretch on to eternity, neither of them spoke. Finally, Phantom made his choice. "While I have no care for history, I will say only this: you have chosen to spare one life over another without the Judges' approval, as is your right. But…the solar core may prove to be more easily replicated than the materials powering his red counterpart, and what then? Do we kill them both? Then we will have been little better off than we are now. You have made your choice, Master X, but I beg you to consider…what if you were wrong?"


	2. Living History

_Alright, well, here's chapter 2. I'm excited we got such positive feedback on the first chapter: it only gets better from here. Feel free to ask me questions, although I won't answer them if I feel it's too much of a spoiler. But legitimate questions about this verse, something a character did, setup, etc? Or if something is unclear? Yes, constructive criticism is encouraged and appreciated. Our chapter lengths vary, even if I'd like to keep them uniform (in an ideal world), some scenes simply did not work out that way. This one's a good size, though. _

_Also: this site didn't save my scene breaks and got rid of the spaces between italics the first time around, I've edited and hopefully, it'll stick this time.  
><em>

_We don't own Mega Man: Capcom does. Read and enjoy!_

* * *

><p>Eventually, X became bored with the procedure and left the room, but not before barking more orders at the others in the room. They visibly winced, visibly cringed whenever his gaze fell on them, whenever he spoke. As he left, the one called 'Hidden Phantom' deftly followed, three paces behind.<p>

Well, that left one of X's progeny in the room, 'Sage Harpuia'. He was willing to bet that the 'sage' part was an honorific, a title, and if the condition of the city was any indication, it wasn't one that was rightly earned.

The same way X hadn't rightly earned the title of 'master'.

Watching this was…he was fortunate that he was even online to see what was happening, fortunate that he had a recourse, but in the meantime…

They'd stripped him down to his bodysuit. His _bodysuit_. He was _not_ going to walk around like that. He was barefoot!

But naturally, any facility that fabricated items for humans was on this network, along with every other resource, and it took all the effort of a thought to requisition some mechaniloids to prepare some clothing for him. He flipped through the designs disinterestedly, then uploaded specs to the mechaniloids. Fabric type, thread count, dye color, and _quality_. They even needed patterns and, of course, his measurements (at least his body never changed weight the way humans' did). Boots. His sunglasses. Leather, rubber, and plastic. Lenses. It would be done immediately, he was told. Of course it would. What good little ones.

The environment outside the city was apparently not controlled by the systems here and it was a heated wasteland. A desert. He could overheat, but his system had an effective cooling system (and these clumsy mechanics hadn't tampered with it thus far), so he wagered that he'd be able to make good time before having to stop to rest. And Rock's estimated weight just kept decreasing.

He turned his focus to the city's layout. The facility where he'd requisitioned those mechaniloids was unmanned: there were only robot-level drones there. According to the data logs, a Reploid overseer only came in if there was a problem.

Well, according to the system, this plant was about to have no problem whatsoever, even if it burst into flames and flew off into the stratosphere.

From there…mm. Yes, that would work. And if not…there were weak points here, here and here. And here and here. And…it didn't even matter which way he went, did it? All the better.

And all the while, he kept a careful eye on Rock's steady decline and on the slowly improving condition of his own body.

* * *

><p>Copy X remained silent for the rest of the ride upwards through the tower, torn between whether he should chide Phantom for the near disrespectful way that he had questioned Copy X's decision and considering Phantom's point. Nothing so far had been discovered about the core that was powering the red unit, only that the energy signature was almost unrealistically off the charts. If it couldn't be replicated…?<p>

The lift came to a smooth stop, door sliding open, and Copy X stepped onto his personal floor, barely even noticing the two guards posted outside of the main entry to his chambers. Zan'ei assassins, based off of Phantom's designs and personally trained by him, they had been placed on duty a few weeks prior as a precautionary response. There had been rumors around the city of a resistance faction living outside of Neo Arcadia proper, armed and plotting against Master X and the city. With little more than gossip fueling their concern, the Judges had requested that something be done just in case the rumors proved more substantial. Phantom had felt it an unnecessary measure, considering how far into the tower Master X's quarters were, but four of his best had been placed on alternating twelve-hour shifts at Master X's door. Without the direct permission of Neo Arcadia's ruler, the guards were to cut down anyone that dared try and enter the chamber.

There was something sinister in the fact that Phantom himself could be cut down if so ordered.

With a tired sigh, Copy X triggered the release mechanism on his helmet, pulling the item off and resting it on a nearby table. Moving to the charger, Copy X hefted himself in, silently appreciative when Phantom moved toward him and plugged the cable into the lower port on his neck. "You seem worried, Phantom. Perhaps you are afraid that I have taken your words offensively?"

Phantom remained silent, but allowed his gaze to fall to the floor, more saddened by Copy X's decision than afraid of his own fate.

There was little shock at the Guardian's silence. For him to have spoken as much as he had before had been strangely out of character for him. "I am not angered, if that is what has stilled your tongue." He pressed the fingers of one hand to his head, sighing again. "You were not in the Judges' chambers with me earlier, arrived after they had brought recent news to light, so you do not understand fully why I am so concerned with restoring only one unit." Out of the four Guardians, Phantom was the only one that Copy X trusted so readily that he did not feel any trepidation at letting the Reploid know of the events that had transpired behind those doors. "You know as well as I that the energy crisis is quickly getting out of hand. Bit by bit, our resources are failing faster than we can handle. Despite the need for Reploid forces in the city to ensure the safety and survival of our human population, we cannot continue to produce and retain our own numbers as we have been."

Copy X fell silent, the words of Judge Flizard echoing in his mind. "Though Judges Inarabitta and Mantisk disagree, the rest of the Judges believe that we may have no other recourse but to retire any units in the city whose energy expenditure levels are above a certain range. With the city's charger pods networked, Judge Foxtar believes we can keep track of every Reploid in the city and monitor the amount of energy they're pulling from the system."

Phantom could only stare at his master in disbelief. "Do you truly mean to tell me that the energy crisis has reached such a stage that we are forced to retire innocent Reploids simply for _the__ way __they __were __originally__ built_? Can we not simply have mandatory upgrades to help reduce the energy drain? Is death the only way?"

"Unless something can be done, and quickly, with those units that were recovered, I'm afraid we no longer have a choice. The humans remain the more important species, as you are well aware. As much as it makes me question the Judges, as well as myself, this seems to be a case where the needs of the many will outweigh the lives of selected few. Sacrifices will have to be made." Copy X reached for the control switch that would seal his charge pod. "Our resources are far too strained, Phantom. Even upgrading the Reploids could prove disastrous to the city because of the sheer amount of supplies needed." He locked eyes with the Guardian, sorrow evident in the crimson orbs. "That is why I sacrificed the second unit, why I could not let the crew restore them both."

As the pod's top half slid into place to begin the charging process, Copy X hoped that Phantom was not perceptive enough to pick up that his master had been lying between his teeth.

Phantom bowed gracefully and turned to exit the chamber, snapping a quick salute to the guards on either side of the door. As he entered the lift, he said softly to himself in a voice that could no longer hide its grief, "It is as you say…Master."

* * *

><p>Finally, once they were satisfied that his body was alright, that he'd be well enough to activate, they turned to Rock and began to prepare to remove his power core.<p>

_Enough_. The sick, angered feeling curled around him. He'd been patient long enough. This was enough. It was a simple thing, simple as tilting his head or flicking his wrist. Shifting his weight. It was enough to pull a trigger on the network, and everything went tumbling into his net. His grip went from a careful examination to an iron fist.

_All __of__ this__ is __mine.__You __will __trade __him__ for __your __own__ city._

The lights in the lab didn't flicker, didn't fade. They went dead. And not just the lab. The entire building, the entire complex, the entire city was plunged into darkness. Only the computers remained online. Only the network remained awake. Except it was his network now.

Immediately, alarms went off, the kind that meant there'd been a riot, the kind that meant that deaths had occurred—human deaths. The alarms went off in several places in the city at once, the darkness only adding panic and confusion to the city. Everything that had a computer chip, everything that touched this network was his now. Every tool, every appliance, every computer, every interface. For the time being, anyone existing here was on _his_ charity.

Outside, guard drones began attacking Reploid guards that came to investigate the alarms.

Harpuia was out the door the second the alarms sounded, concern flooding his systems when he realized that the mobilization signals to the Rekku fleet weren't even making it onto the network. The entire communications array had been shut down. Leaning further forward as he ran, boosters coming online as he sped through the halls, Harpuia diverted down a hallway that led toward the outer walls of the soaring tower. Pulling one of his sabers from its sheath, he readied the weapon, snapping the blade through the air as he neared the outer wall, the energy wave ripping through the thick glass and providing Harpuia all the structural damage necessary, the Guardian curling up on himself as he crashed through the window and took to the air.

Harpuia's sudden departure had left the tech crew more on edge than the power failure had, several of the analysts scrambling around the room in a panic, some of them searching for a light source, others for the nearest exist. They knew about the alarms, knew what it meant, understood that if the power had been taken out and the communications network taken down, something_big_ had hit the city.

Blues finally sat up on the lab table and swung his legs over the edge while the analysts were still panicked and confused. None had suspected that he had anything to do with it. Oh, no, it's not like Robot Masters were _network__ managers_ or anything. They'd even called him a progenitor. They didn't seem to be able to understand what that meant.

They were too ignorant to even recognize that he'd been awake the entire time.

He didn't waste time talking to the analysts; instead, he pulled out the wires and slid off the table, tested his joints. Perfect working order. Just _wonderful_. He crossed the room and grabbed one of the padded lengths of fabric that they'd been transported in. It wasn't quite a blanket, but the idea was similar. He moved over to Rock and closed his open panels, an impatient and irritated noise escaping with his breath.

It was the first sound he'd made.

He bundled Rock into the blanket. Careful, careful. Once the child was settled, he wrapped the blanket securely around him and tied it off. He could carry him this way. No outside dust would get into his systems once they got out of the city, either.

Ah, his shield. It'd taken a beating over the years, hadn't it? And yet it held. It was probably better quality than the armor these 'Reploids' used. Their armor looked like a lot of padding with minimal physical protection, though without knowing the fabric's composition, he really couldn't evaluate it.

He finally bothered to glance at the analysts, the researchers. "Stay down," he told them flatly, then opened the door and slipped into the hall, carrying the bundle that was Rock over one shoulder.

Now the fun began. He darted off, towards his first stop: the warehouse.

Once the footsteps of the ancient Reploid were no longer audible, the research team immediately began to scramble about, trying desperately to find the source of the power outage and subsequent alarms. The near pitch-black darkness of the room did nothing to help the situation, and soon the flurry of activity became jumbled chaos as Reploids who did not have any night vision or low-light modifications continuously tripped over wires, equipment, and each other. Those few who could see were hardly any better off: backup generators, emergency CPUs, even internalized power sources were offline. There was no way to access any information, or even to power the devices that would be doing the accessing in the first place. Communications were down as well, to the point where some of the techs were surprised that they were even able to speak.

Shortly after the mess began, the techs in the lab heard the voice of their leader. "Okay, everyone stop for a second and calm down! We can tell by now that power and comms are completely shot. This leaves us the whole city as one big target. In fact, it's likely that this is the beginning of an attack by the Resistance, so remember your training! Anyone with night- or low-light vision, spread out and find the rest of us some emergency lights, then look for the Guardians and update on the current situation," the tech lead absentmindly fell onto the now-empty table, "including the loss of the two excavated units. Meanwhile, once we get some light, we will get ourselves to the power plant and assist in any way possible, so meet us there ASAP! Now hurry!"

The few techs who could see led the rest of their coworkers near the door to await a light source, then quickly scattered into the hall, keeping a surprisingly sharp eye out for anything that could be used to light the way for the ones they left behind. The lead tech sighed, pulled himself further onto the table, and crossed his legs. "Please, _please_ be a drill…"

* * *

><p>Ciel and a few of the Resistance members had been darting through the hallways of Neo Arcadia's underbelly, two squads of Pantheon Hunters close on their tails, when the lights had gone dead, plunging the already dimly-lit halls into absolute darkness. She screamed, the sound quickly cut off as Milan wrapped one arm around her waist and the other clasped a hand over her mouth, pulling her clear of the Pantheon's fire. Had it not been for the Reploid's proximity to her during the raid, she would have fought to get free. Instead, she closed her eyes and forced her body to relax, tried to settle her rapidly-beating heart.<p>

"With any luck, these Pantheons won't have any night vision capabilities." The words were scarcely whispered to Ciel when Milan heard the telltale sound of the Pantheons switching out their busters for electro-clubs. "Oh, good, they're Pantheon Variables. Now we can get beaten to death with stun rods…"

The light given off by the stun rods did have its disadvantages, however, as a few of the Resistance members that had been behind Ciel and Milan used the faint light as a target, their buster pistols blowing the heads off of the first three Pantheons. The bodies dropped to the floor, and Ciel heard one of the Resistance members swear when the light from the stun rods faded. The remaining Pantheons were quick to move back, a number of them switching back to their busters and watching for the flicker of the pistols' laser sights.

One Pantheon caught a flash of red, turning and firing, a short scream echoing through the halls followed by a heavy thump.

"Milan," Ciel whispered, "we have to get moving." She felt outward, her hand finding floor but no wall near her. At least, not yet. Pulling herself free of Milan's grasp and careful to avoid making any noise, she moved slowly until her hand touched against a wall panel. A soft touch on her shoulder alerted her that Milan had followed.

"The team can handle the Pantheons for now. We have to get to the lab," Milan agreed, gently nudging her forward.

Ciel couldn't tell how far she and Milan had gotten from the bulk of their group, but she froze at the sound of metal striking against metal, her head snapping back towards where the Resistance members were. They wouldn't…

She ducked down, hands over her ears, as the energy grenade went off, the clatter of various Reploid parts against the metallic floor like thunder in the confined space.

Milan listened to the sound of the grenade as closely as he could, took in the cacophonic rain of parts, tried as best he could to place every sound as it happened, measuring, estimating. _Assuming __the __worst, __our __own __forces__ were __at __least __ten __or __so__ yards __away__ when __the__ lights __went__ out. __We __made __thirty __paces,__ roughly __twenty __yards.__ The__ grenade__ hit __from __further __away,__ so __it __was __aimed __at __the __Pantheons. __I __just __hope __there__'__s __a__ corner __nearby__…_

Milan briefly told Ciel of his intentions, then thumbed the light to his buster pistol and sprinted down the hall, the human leader of the Resistance just ahead of him. The sudden light down the hall caused the remaining Pantheons to fire in short order, the Resistance members doing their best to stop as many as they could, thumbing the lights to their own pistols in an effort to improve their aim. Pistol and buster fire roared throughout the hall, Reploids on both sides falling quickly in the confined space as plasma rounds filled the hallway with light, fire, and death. One distinctly wild shot hit Milan in the back of his shoulder, spinning him to the ground with the force of the impact. The pistol flew from his hand, landing a short distance away and pointing to a turn in the corridor.

Ciel stopped short at the sound of her compatriot hitting the floor, turning and falling to her knees next to him, desperately trying to help him back onto his feet. "Milan, are you okay?" she asked, panic blending with worry. "Where were you hit?" Another yelp escaped her as a plasma shot flitted past her head, missing her by inches.

Milan heaved himself up quickly, pushing Ciel towards the light. "It's just my shoulder! Get around the corner already!" He half-followed, half-shoved Ciel around the bend, scooping up his pistol with his good arm. They ran a short distance down the passage when they were stopped by a massive door blocking their progress. "Okay, if you want to start worrying about my arm, now's a good time. I would like to add that my aim is terrible with my functioning arm…"

* * *

><p>The facility was neat and orderly. It was a large, boxy building with small windows dotting the upper half in neat rows. It looked a lot like warehouses back in the twenty-first century. Perhaps some things never changed. He didn't approach from the street. This sector was far enough away from any residential district that the streets were mostly deserted, but he didn't want to be seen. If he was seen, he might be followed and he couldn't afford a fight, not when he had much more pressing concerns.<p>

There was an electronic lock on the door, but it slid open when he approached, then slipped shut behind him. The warehouse was dark, but he sensed where the drones were and they uploaded floor plans and room layouts to him. Not that he would need to go very far in; his items were being delivered here.

He found a sturdy table and gently laid his bundle down, then turned to accept the gear from the drones. He dressed as quickly as he could in the darkness. He felt better this way, even if the clothing didn't afford any real protection against shots. He was covered now and it was with no small amount of approval that he took his newly-made scarf and sunglasses from the little robot.

In the distance sirens whined, and far to the north a new alarm blared.

On the main streets, people were running in a panic, and with their communications down, the city's defense was slow to react. They were disorganized and panicked, sometimes just as much as the citizens. There was no discipline here.

He could keep tabs on everything easily with the cameras stationed throughout the city, even if there weren't many microphones to hear from. He pulled his gloves on and slipped his sunglasses over the bridge of his nose, still listening to the network, then moved back to the bundle that contained Rock, gently lifting it and placing it over one shoulder.

He'd watched them work on him: they hadn't gone near his headcase, hadn't gone near his memory, but he knew he'd feel better once they got somewhere quiet, somewhere secure, and he could give him a proper scan.

He wouldn't wake him, though, not like this. Not inoperational with parts missing. That'd be too cruel. A link to his systems would be enough, once he could pass some energy through his core. Or better yet, get him into some sunlight.

* * *

><p>Ciel looked up at the door, the cold gray metal towering nearly twenty feet above them. There was no visible break in the frame or the door, so she couldn't tell how the thing was even supposed to open, let alone if it still could. The Reploid thought to be behind this impenetrable slab of metal was vital to all of their plans. Moving closer to the door, her eyes fell across something, and she signaled for Milan to point the light towards it. "I thought so. It's a security access panel." She frowned slightly, realizing that for all her technical know-how with programming, she wasn't skilled in hacking and didn't have any idea about Neo Arcadian passcodes.<p>

Especially when this particular code could be almost a century old.

* * *

><p>He knew that to a human, Rock would still be pretty heavy, but to another Robot Master, to an android? He's be too light to be a person. He knew that they'd assume he was stealing parts or something that could be sold. There were people panicking, people rioting, and people looting. He didn't particularly want to be mistaken for a looter and he definitely didn't want to be intercepted, so the most prudent route to take would be underground. He'd left the mechaniloids in their warehouse. He'd have liked to take them, but as it was, he needed to travel lightly and they'd be too easy to destroy in the chaos.<p>

There were access doors to the underground in strategic points. He chose one that was mainly used for maintenance, one that no one had disturbed in the dark. It slid open when he approached, locking shut behind him once he stepped down. He reached out over the network, feeling for the guard robots that would surely be down here.

Oh, this was odd. No troops had come underground, yet there were several guards that were not responsive. And there were reports of combat in their last log entries. Well. He'd have to move carefully.

There were bodies in the hall, downed Pantheons (at least, that was what the system had designated them as) and what appeared to be several dead Reploids as well. His eyes were set to night vision, so he could see them despite the darkness. He crouched down by one once his scans verified that none of them were alive any longer. They weren't wearing anything that looked like the military uniforms he'd seen.

He stepped over them carefully and continued down the hall, this time moving more cautiously. There was life ahead. There were more downed Pantheons, spilled coolant on the floor. He stepped around it distastefully.

He heard voices.

He waited in the darkness for a few moments, taking the time to scan them. A Reploid and…a human?

She sounded half-panicked, something about the electronic lock and needing to move quickly, before more Pantheons came.

He calculated the angle that the Reploid beside her would have to shoot and how quickly he'd need to move, even with Rock over one shoulder. He shifted so he was partially shielded by rubble before speaking. He couldn't afford to take chances.

"There are no more guards in this section."

It was looking to be one of _those_ days, Ciel noted, as she once again ended up yelling in surprise and nearly jumped out of her skin. Honestly, if this kept up, the chances of her seeing the end of the war were going to be low for all the wrong reasons. Her hand smacked against the access panel, the system beeping at her in what she took for yet another improperly-entered code. Unable to speak without risking more yelling, Ciel was quick to duck behind Milan, the Reploid already raising his pistol, finger hovering over the trigger threateningly.

At least they weren't so dumb as to shoot first and ask questions later. He wasn't actually unarmed, but he looked as though he was and, honestly, he'd rather keep his buster as a surprise. The door hissed and slid open when she yelped and smacked the control panel; he half-expected her to panic with how frightened she already was. It was a good cover.

He remained hidden behind the rubble—it looked like it'd been a portion of the wall once—and spoke again. "I'm unarmed," technically true, given that his buster wasn't formed. "Lower your weapon."

If they refused…the human present would complicate this. The Reploids were likely not governed by the Three Laws and even though her guard was unlikely to turn on her, it'd be hard to incapacitate him if she remained so close.

Milan tightened his grip on the trigger, considering whether or not he would have time to charge up his next shot—and considering whether or not it might be his last. "First your identification code, and it had better be one that is pleasant to my ears." He motioned for Ciel to continue into the chamber without him, and when she looked ready to protest, he shot her a look that made her blush and run into the room beyond the door and, with any luck, towards the person they were here to recruit.

"Blues." He said the word simply, still hiding. He had the bundle that contained Rock between the wall and his body, giving him the most shielding, the most protection. He highly doubted this one would recognize his name: most people in the twenty-first century didn't recognize his name, even if Rock's combat alias, Mega Man, was a household name.

Obscurity meant he could move freely: he preferred it that way.

He'd rather have skipped this encounter altogether, but there wasn't an alternate route that was quite so secure—and a human child and a mostly-blind Reploid were much better odds than a frantic mob.

_Wait,__ a __name __instead __of __a__ serial? _thought Milan._That __means __he__'__s __up __there __in __the __ranks, __but __as __for __his __loyalties? __He __could __be __a __new __Judge __for __all __I__ know__…__except__…_

Milan eased up on the trigger, the gun still pointed in the general direction of the voice coming from around the corner, even if he knew he couldn't hit his target with his bad arm, not with the way the other Reploid had positioned himself. "Blues what?"

"Just Blues," and there was an audible shrug along with the voice. The only other names he went by were Proto Man and Break Man, and those were dead giveaways for what he was. He was eyeing the Reploid: he hadn't lowered his weapon, but he also hadn't edged around to try to get a better shot. And his other arm looked like it'd sustained damage…ah, that's why he's so tense. Disabled with a human child to look after.

The fools shouldn't have brought her down here to begin with.

_Not __a __Judge. __Good. __Here__'__s __hoping__ he__'__ll __answer __this __next __question __honestly._ Milan was hoping Ciel would be able to find what she was looking for soon; he had no idea if there were more reinforcements coming. "No title? Then what's your serial number?"_With __any __luck, __he__'__ll __assume __I__ don__'__t __know__ the __general__ serial __numbers __associated __with __the __various __Guardians__' __armies.__ If__ I__ don__'__t__ know__ it,__ I__'__ll__ have__ to__ take __my__ chances__ and__ ask__ for__ his__ help__…_

He actually startled at that, a smile breaking across his face. Ah, when was the last time someone asked him that? Well, if he wanted the serial number he could have it, for all the good it'd do him. "DLN-000."

Milan was dumbstruck. "What…?" was all he could manage to say, his pistol lowering to his side in disbelief. "Either you're _ridiculously_ old, or you're part of a newly-made model line. Considering the energy crisis and the fact you've been _named_, I can only assume the former. Either way, I don't think I could really put a stop to you if you didn't want me to. The name's Milan, Reploid serial CA-76. If you're here to stop us from looking for the legendary Reploid for the Resistance, hurry and get it over with; otherwise, give us a hand."

Legendary Reploid? Ah, so that's what was sealed behind the door. Something was strange, though. This wasn't them retrieving a lost comrade. He called this one a "legendary Reploid" rather than using a name. He was too unfamiliar with what had gone on during his time offline to even draw conclusions based on that little bit of data.

"Your systems are on a very high alert and…you're still targeting me." Even with his pistol at his hip. No, he wasn't coming out, not yet, not when he may as well still be pointing that pistol at him.

He didn't tell him about how he noticed that his shooting arm was disabled, that he was nearly blind in the dark, and that it'd be far too easy for even a clumsy mechaniloid to take him down.

Milan chanced a quick check behind him to make sure Ciel was out of sight, then dropped into a battle-ready stance, setting his pistol to begin charging. "So, you noticed. Fine, then, I'll be very frank with you: help us, leave, or come out and fight, but you had better decide soon. There is likely going to be an entire squadron of Pantheons of all kinds barreling down on this position sometime very soon, so if you're not on their side, you had best be ready for a hell of a fight."

His voice sounded amused again, but he stepped into the open, just enough for the Reploid to see him. He was carrying something over one shoulder, but it was mostly obscured behind the rubble he'd been using to shield himself. "I already told you, there are no Pantheons coming." He raised his free hand, palm outward in a placating, 'I mean no harm' kind of gesture. "And I already told you, I'm _unarmed_." But not helpless. "I want to leave this city," he continued, "so if we're going the same way…" He sort of shrugged, but the confidence in his voice could be heard.

He may be unarmed, but he certainly wasn't afraid. He wasn't processing Milan as a threat at all.

_Good__ enough, __at__ least __for __now_, mused Milan, diffusing the charge on his pistol. "Well, if you're really trying to leave the city, then we'll help as best we can, but first we have to try to get what we came here for. Otherwise, what was the point of all the sacrifices of my unit? Come on, we have to find Ciel." Milan turned and jogged briskly into the room beyond the door, silently hoping to himself that he wouldn't get shot in the back suddenly. When that didn't happen, he looked back to find Blues following a somewhat short distance behind. _But __not __too __short. __Do __I __really __seem__ that __jumpy?__ Or__ is __this __guy__ somehow _not _from__ around __here?_

This room wasn't darkened: there was plenty of ambient lighting from the capsule in the center of the room and varying panels displaying data. The main lights were resolutely darkened, but…ah, this was on a separate system. He didn't bother touching it, though. Not if they'd come here to wake whomever was in here.

He'd watched the Reploid warily the entire time. Even if he read it as Blues giving too much personal space, it was really more like he didn't want anyone getting too close to him or to Rock.

He didn't want to chance it, and traveling in a strange group already made this more risky.

So. A resistance, presumably against X's regime. It was almost encouraging to know that someone in this time period had a brain. Almost. He eyed Ciel.

He'd never have allowed a human to come down here with him.

She was occupied with the panels, with the occupant of the pod.

There was no information about this room, about this pod, on the network, which was suspicious in itself. _Everything_ else was on here, even 'top secret' orders and data.

For this area to be off the map for the government here…

Or perhaps this was an individual that they'd hidden here, someone they didn't want getting out.

He glanced back at the door, calculated.

Ciel stopped for a moment, collecting her thoughts before turning her attention back to the plethora of status screens, all of which were bombarding her vision with red flag after status alert after error message. _How __long __has __he __been __like __this?_ she wondered, saddened and angered that someone as important to history, both human and Reploid, could have been so idly tossed aside, treated like a plaything that the world no longer wanted to be bothered with. She turned to the pod itself, looking forlornly at the hunched figure on the bottom of the pod, a multitude of wires jacked into ports running along his spine. While most analysis pods only required use of the primary and secondary ports at the base of a Reploid's skull, this pod required far more than that, and Ciel could only guess at why they'd jacked into his neural control system so far away from the processor that ran it all. His helmet was chipped in a few locations, and one of the white bands running back from his cheek was completely shattered.

Turning her attention back to the screens, she moved her hands over the displayed information, reviewing and dismissing a number of the alerts as she tried to find either the maintenance logs or the activation controls. Her body stiffened perceptively when one of the status alert windows informed her that power consumption rates had been lowered to the minimum allotted levels to keep his systems from full shutdown, even during an extended hibernation period. At this rate, Zero wasn't going to be able to stand once they got him out, let alone get all the way back to the Resistance base. Without bringing his internal change levels back to operational minimums, they risked crashing all of his systems and completely reformatting his neural processor, which would prove far more devastating to the Resistance's efforts than not finding him would have. To make matters worse, she'd finally found the maintenance logs she'd been searching for, nearly sick at the fact that his last diagnostic had been run over seven decades ago. That long ago, Ciel knew, meant that his systems wouldn't be able to use Energen Crystals. Reploids of the current era could either charge in pods or consume crystals to restore their internal charge levels. Zero needed a charger pod that could actually generate the needed power, and the one he was secured in looked more ready to fall apart then reactivate him. Worse still was the apparent power outage that had hit the city. Had the energy crisis gotten so bad that the power was shutting down, or had Copy X demanded a full shutdown of the city's resources to help alleviate the problem?

Knowing Copy X, the second option had never actually crossed his mind. Rather Reploids suffer and die than he act as a responsible leader and mandate energy rationing or conservation methods until the problem could be fixed.

Reaching into her vest pocket, Ciel withdrew a small rectangular box, keying in a short sequence before the object illuminated, a small pink-and-white-clad Cyber Elf that she'd been raising for some time manifested from within. Much like Reploids, Cyber Elves sustained themselves on Energen Crystals, although the Elves needed them to grow and mature. A Nurse Elf such as Passy would provide the healing that Zero's systems likely needed, as well as the charge enough to at least make it to the base so that he could be plugged into a charger pod there.

Milan looked over to Ciel as Passy was called from the storage device Ciel often carried with her. If she was summoning a Nurse Reploid...? Considering Zero's condition, it wasn't hard to put two and two together as to what she was intending to do. Walking over to her, Milan knelt down, carefully balancing on the balls of his feet. "Ciel, what are you doing?"

She could feel the dull ache behind her eyes, the first signs that she was starting to cry. It was one thing to be part of the force that took down Pantheons that were trying to retire innocent Reploids. It was something completely different to use a Cyber Elf for their skills, knowing that the energy expenditure was enough to kill them. "We need him back online, Milan, but the power levels in this facility aren't enough. If I try to wake him as he is, I may very well destroy him and leave a burned-out husk. There's barely enough power to keep his pod functioning, let alone ensure that he's got at least the absolute minimum operational charge level."

The Reploid could sense the turmoil Ciel was going through, knowing all too well how much she advocating the raising of Cyber Elves only for the sake of maturing them. She abhorred the idea of killing elves for their abilities and rarely turned to anyone or anything besides Cerveau to handle damage done to any of their troops. He leaned forward a bit, resting a comforting hand on Ciel's shoulder, and smiled, hoping that it would soothe her.

Ciel nodded softly, turning to look at Zero. "Passy," she said softly, "we need your help." She motioned to the lifeless body within the pod. "He needs your help." Reaching into another pocket, she offered the elf a single blue crystal.

Passy smiled softly, taking the gift for a moment before returning it. "Hold onto that for another that needs it, Ciel," the little elf chimed, taking to the air. "Don't worry about me," she said reassuringly. "Everyone is waiting for you to return with Zero. Thank you for letting me be the one to help you." Smiling, Passy flew towards the pod, moving unimpeded through the glass and impacting against Zero's head crystal before vanishing into thin air.

Ciel tried and failed to choke back a sob as a wash of blue-white energy flowed over Zero's body.

Blues stared at the spot where the little…what _was_ that?...disappeared. It took him a moment to realize what just happened, a moment to realize that that little thing, that little _life_, was just extinguished. And the human and the Reploid were looking sad, like this was something that happened. Like this was something that was sad, but not uncommon.

Like this had been necessary.

He felt that anger, that indignation creep over him again and his grip on his bundle tightened. The girl was crying, upset, but she hadn't even paused to find out if there was another way. She hadn't hesitated or questioned it, didn't try to engineer a better method.

He kept his distance from those two, his systems going into alert, because he hadn't missed what that darling little thing had called the Reploid in the pod.

Zero.

_Zero_. He knew, logically, that they weren't looking at Wily's last creation as a savior, that they had to know better than to trust anything engineered to kill as that android had been.

So that meant someone out there, somewhere, at some time, had the horrible taste to name their own Reploid after that android.

There had to be a species-wide logic bypass affecting their performance. There had to be. They were just as illogical as _humanity._

Groaning heavily, the Reploid pushed himself to his feet, long tail of blonde hair falling fluidly along his back as the analysis connection system disengaged from his body, and he grasped the vest lying at his feet, pulling the item on as he stood. Repair nanites, hibernating for years, had finally awoken, several internal repairs being done while the external damage logged by his systems was oddly absent, though there were a flood of damage reports coming in from the nanite control mainframe. Obsidian eyes turned to the three individuals near him, confusion evident in his features. Taking a step back, he looked at the person nearest him, a blonde female that, as far as he could tell, was likely human. "Who…?"

Ciel was still struggling to hold back tears but she pushed herself to her feet, approaching Zero, Milan close behind. "My name…my name is Ciel. We've been looking for you, Zero, but I'm afraid that this is not the best place for introductions. We need to get you out of here, get somewhere safe."

Safe? Out of here? Where _was_ here? And that name…

"Zero?" he asked, eyebrows furrowing as he tried to remember, tried to make sense out of their use of the word. "Is that my name?"

Ciel's eyes went wide. Hadn't she taken all the precautions, ensured that he would be at optimal levels for reactivation? What had gone wrong?

Blues glanced back at the data on the panels: there was a vast improvement in his overall condition, but his energy reading was still rather low. If they…he'd have to move some things around on the surface, but they should be able to secure a fairly safe path out of the city, though where they went from there was up to his companions.

He looked up when 'Zero' asked for his own name. "…How long was he in stasis?"

Ciel turned to the individual that had followed Milan, having barely noticed him before. "We…honestly can't tell, although he's theoretically been here for about a hundred years. His last diagnostic was almost three-quarters of a century ago, but I can't find any record of when his sealing was actually performed in terms of an actual date." She tilted her head to the side, confused about this stranger's sudden interest. If Milan had been trusting enough to allow him in here, she was sure it wouldn't risk anything to let him know, but…

Milan turned his attention to Blues, his gaze both curious and concerned. "What does it matter to you?"

Blues' head was tilted, considering their latitude and longitude, doing some calculations in his head. No, Wily never built a skull fortress here. But for him to be…

He looked to Ciel and Milan or, at least, his head turned toward them: his sunglasses made it impossible to see his eyes. "The logs indicate that the maintenance cycles became less frequent over time. Without being able to run his own maintenance…" Without his mind being able to clean itself up, having only a failing machine to rely on, "Well, it's no surprise that memory files became compromised." Though without looking at 'Zero's' mind, he could say whether they could be restored. As a Reploid, it'd be a moot point anyway: they couldn't network.

He was fortunate that his own mind was still clean, but he had a working power source.

Now that he thought about it, Rock might need a lot of work, a lot more restoration than just physical.

Ciel looked behind her to the pod's screens, turning back around to look at Blues, her eyes failing to hide the questions tearing through her mind. "How…what…?" She blinked. "How did you know that?"

Now he frowned at her, as though she just asked him something very simple, something that everyone ought to know. "He's a _machine_. Just like a human body, without proper maintenance, without proper _care_, things wear out and break. Memory is not infallible." Honestly, she'd handled technology before, hadn't she?

Zero took a careful step forward, testing his body, ensuring that he was able to move, ensuring that he could fight. Behind his eyes, his system was reloading battle protocols and weapon skills. Reaching to his thigh, he pulled the buster pistol from its holster, nodding slightly when he verified it had enough of a charge that he wouldn't have to concern himself too greatly with it running low on energy.

Something was missing, though. The sheath on his other leg, fashioned for a different weapon, was oddly empty.

"I'm missing one of my weapons," Zero stated plainly. "Where is my other weapon?"

Both Ciel and Milan were taken aback by this. For him not to remember his own name and yet be asking for a missing weapon?

"What are you missing?" Ciel asked, watching as Zero patted the weapon sheath on his right leg as if contact with the area would jog his memory.

"I'm…I'm not entirely certain," he admitted.

Blues frowned again, but not at Ciel this time. There was…ah, another administrator finally logged into the network. Except his access, his level of influence, was limited the way the humans were, the way Reploids were. The way those trapped inside their own minds were. It was a non-issue; Blues had greater authority here.

Except.

Wait. That felt…not familiar, but…

One of the screens on the diagnostic machine flared to life, then a second, as if a current were jumping from one to the next. Zero and Ciel both turned, watching the screens flash with a brief halo-like image before fading back to inactivity.

Milan's hand drifted down to his gun, even if it was his off-hand he was grabbing the weapon with.

_Come __on, __where __is __it?_ X whispered to himself, sorting through the data files. Nearly everything that the analysis team had on Zero was stored in this lab, from his original and copy bodies to his weapons and, at one point in time, backup copies of his entire neural mainframe. _Thanks__ for __everything, __Weil_, he thought bitterly. Moving for another file stored on the sole surviving computer, X could only hope that he could figure out where they'd locked Zero's modified saber and how to undo those locks. If only…

Wait…

What the…?

There was someone else on the network? Hadn't Neo Arcadia's entire system gone offline? Well, there went all his careful planning and amazing ninja stealth skills. Everything disrupted by someone else on the network that he hadn't noticed before jumping from Sanctum Yggdrasil to Zero's chamber. And this was supposed to be a disconnected, secure network.

Impatiently, Blues pinged him. If this was who he thought it was, then his systems would be set up to be able to interact with Robot Masters to some extent, if only to check his health and status.

And there it was. No identification number, but the frequency was proof enough. X was _here_? And…this wasn't the X he'd seen in the…

What the _hell_.

Irritated, he scanned his youngest brother, cleaned off anything he could be tracked by. The network was secured; anyone who got in didn't stay online long enough to do anything without his express permission.

…A ping? No one used pings anymore, X knew, not since wireless communication access was made mainstream.

Okay, so…older model? But that would mean…

There were some days X really wished he'd have backed up his memory files right after Doctor Cain had pulled him out of his pod all those years ago.

Mentally shrugging, X reached out into the network, tried to follow the ping back to an origin point to answer it, but…

Okay, that just couldn't be possible. He could feel another on the network, but they had no origin location? Wait, never mind, there was…

Did the origin point just _shift_?

'_Who__ are __you __and__ what __are __you __doing__ on __this __network?__'_ X demanded. '_This __is __supposed__ to __be __a __secure __server __that __can__'__t __be __accessed __from __Neo __Arcadian __network __terminals.__'_

Well, that at least proved one thing. The origin point of the ping _was_ moving, but…that would mean they weren't on the network at a terminal.

X was moving all over, trying to find him, trying to pinpoint him and locate him, as though he were another Reploid on the server.

Blues realized that X hadn't caught on about what he'd just stumbled into. Had this been another Robot Master, he'd have grabbed them and set them down to orient them, but he wasn't sure that the android would appreciate that.

'_At __the __moment, __this __network __is__ mine. __As __for __secure __server__…__well, __yes, __it__ is __a__ secure __server_ now.' It had not been secure previously.

X froze at the mention of network ownership. Not all of his memory files had hit the recycle bin over his lifespan, and that one definitely rang a bell. Well, at least that explained the ping, even if there wasn't an identity he could pin down. _That_information, unfortunately, had been lost. '_I__'__m __honestly __curious __to __know__ how __a __Robot __Master __is __still __alive, __let __alone __serving __as __network __manager __in__ Neo __Arcadia. __Identify __yourself_,' X ordered, even though any identification, if the individual was forthcoming, would just sail right over his head.

It _sucked_ getting old.

There was a feeling of approval over the network, as though this individual's thoughts resonated over the whole of the system. '_I__ do__ not __believe __we __met, __even __while __you __were __being __built. __Rock __wanted __me __to __come __and__ see, __but__—__ah,__well.__'_ That was water under the bridge now.

'_It __looks __like __your __own__ memory __files __have __deteriorated __over __time__ as__ well.__'_ There was a slight frown in the voice now, a flash of concern over the network. At least X still knew his own identity. '_I__ am __DLN-000._' He said it plainly, clearly feeling that X knowing that wouldn't affect _his_ day whatsoever.

X's data flow stopped dead in his tracks. Okay, scratch previous theory—there _was_ still an identification code or two that he remembered.

'_Blues?_'


	3. Returning to Base

_And here we are, the third chapter of we still don't know how many, and we hope you're enjoying the ride so far. Also, we kind of tripped up on this in the first two chapters. Midnyght's fiance was responsible for a lot of the early work as Phantom and Milan, as well as a mess of our background characters. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, this is the last chapter he actually wrote in, although you will see his work again as Fefnir around chapter...oh, say...38 or so? Something like that, although the Fefnir you're going to see before then is Midnyght's. Same for Phantom and Milan and all those adorable little background characters and a batch of canon-based OCs. So, yeah, just letting you know. Sorry for rambling._

_In this chapter, 'family' is reunited, it's revealed that Zero hasn't suffered a full processor wipe, Blues is given yet another reason to make angryfaceofhate at the Three Laws, and one of the Guardians stumbles on a hidden truth within the Neo Arcadian networks._

_Midnyght Saber and I hope you like the story so far, and we are looking forward to your reviews and comments! Thanks for reading!_

_**Disclaimer:** Mega Man and all related characters and information are the property of Capcom Co., Ltd., Akira Kitamura and Keiji Inafune._

* * *

><p>What in the name of all that was mechanical was going on in Neo Arcadia that the first of the progenitors had just shown up out of the clear blue nowhere and suddenly taken hold over the city's entire network as well as Sanctum Yggdrasil's server?<p>

…And for that matter, where the _hell_ was Zero's saber?

A feeling like a nod came from Blues—no Reploid had ever been able to communicate this way over the network. '_I'm afraid that I've been forced to take this city offline for the time being. I'd apologize to you as ruler of the city,_' that was said with some distaste, '_but you're clearly not holding that position._' Now Blues reached out to X, moved him on the network to be closer to the center of the data flow—it was an odd way to move, a strange way to be moved.

X felt a mild disorientation as the network moved around him, rather than him moving around in the network, but his brother's signal felt stronger, more_ there_. '_I don't hold that position over the city any longer, although that is probably a tale told in safer areas and after I've been able to disengage from the network. It's risky enough for me to be here, though having a manager for once does help._' X's smile echoed through the network at the thought. '_Any chance you could help me find the location and access codes for wherever they locked up Zero's saber? I'd prefer it if the Resistance members got out of here as soon as possible. It was dangerous enough to suggest this mission in the first place._'

A wave of irritation at the thought that X was the one that sent these kids down here. Wait: Zero? So…Blues actually hesitated, and it thrummed in the network.

'_Don't chide me without knowing why I didn't just do it myself,_' X warned. '_I've had more than enough with misunderstandings and people not being willing to listen, so please don't make me have to suffer that from family any more than I have already had to._' He tried to scan the network again, see if there was anything regarding that saber…

'_You…have a problem with Zero?_' X asked, trying to place exactly what he was feeling off of Blues at the mention of his old Hunter partner.

Misunderstandings? Blues understood misunderstandings and what they could cost someone. Blues also understood that Rock was very vulnerable and that this was actually a Wilybot. He understood that while X did seem perfectly sane, he was asking for help with a Wilybot. And they did need to get out of here. He shielded the actual contents of his thoughts, though X could feel the flurry of emotion and the immense worry at the center of it, but not directed at himself, X, or Zero.

No, they had to get out of here before anything else. They could talk later.

The files related to Zero's saber were placed into X's metaphoric lap. It took barely a millisecond for Blues to locate and deliver.

Well, if nothing else, that made life a lot easier. Looking at the information, X frowned at the source location of the files, wondering who in their right mind would have moved the information into such an arbitrary and unrelated folder. Security, maybe, but…

Another screen, this time elsewhere in the room, flickered for a moment, a soft series of key chimes sounding before a small slot popped open on the wall next to the screen. "Zero," a voice called out from the area, "your missing weapon is in here. I'll be back momentarily. I need to find an exit point."

Jumping around the room, X finally settled for using the ports that had been connected to Zero only moments before, his ethereal form quickly materializing as he ejected himself from the network. "Let's get a move on," he said calmly to Ciel and Milan, "and I'm sorry for how badly this mission went. Once the alarms went off, the signals out to the Pantheons trailing you got lost in all the commotion and I couldn't figure out how to reroute them."

Turning, X cast a sidelong glance at Blues, looking questioningly at his clothes as well as the item slung over his back.

No matter. There would be answers back at the base. "Come on, we need to get to a Trans Server and get out of here." He moved forward, half-running, half-floating behind Milan and Ciel. "Come on, Zero," he called. "We've got to go."

Blues didn't acknowledge X's questioning glance and wasn't particularly interested in answering questions. Especially not right now. Well, if they had a base to return to, a base that housed Reploids, there'd be materials there. He could have some of the robots there assemble the parts he needed to begin on Rock.

Assuming they had robots. If they didn't, he'd have to become significantly more surreptitious. Material shortage or no, he'd have the parts.

His initial plan was to get what he needed for Rock, or at least as much as he could, then take the child and leave, but if X was here…

He'd need to find out what was going on, why X was working with Zero. His problem wasn't exactly that he was working with a Wilybot—several of Wily's Robot Masters were quite agreeable—but it was more that he was helping Wily's harbinger of death. The android he's programmed to _destroy humanity_.

It was entirely possible that that portion of Zero's programming had been lost along with his memories—he hadn't made a threatening move toward the human girl—but if it hadn't and he was just sitting on it?

Blues had ways around the Three Laws. Rock didn't. Even command lining him wouldn't work, not if Zero was actively killing.

And it really wasn't …pleasant when he had to do that. It upset him and it upset Rock.

He followed the group silently, keeping stride but still a bit of a distance from the others. X being here didn't mean the others were trustworthy—Blues was too cynical for that—and if one of them did surprise X, if one of them did try to attack him or Rock, he'd rather have the room to move around in.

That brought another matter up: _what happened to X's body?_ He didn't think that X could sustain physical damage in his current form, but…

But he was so similar to that little thing that gave its life.

Just because X was immune to being reprogrammed did not mean that he was safe coming online into a network that was housed in _someone else's mind_. Blues was used to having people there, even if X was incredibly restricted: he couldn't actually share headspace. He was there, but couldn't really interact with Blues the way another Robot Master could. It was the difference between being a spectator and being a player in the game. X couldn't do more than spectate.

Blues was translating some for X's benefit, letting the android get the gist of his emotions, even if X couldn't actually feel them empathetically. And Blues couldn't feel X empathetically, couldn't feel his thoughts, the way he would have one of his other brothers'.

That divide would be impassible, but it was for X's protection. Especially after what happened to Blues, after what happened to the First Numbers.

But still. If this planet somehow birthed someone with the intellectual fortitude to build a new Robot Master, and X slipped onto _their_ network? There was very little the android could have done aside from disengaging from the network before he was caught and caged there, and without a body to even retreat to?

He knew he couldn't just make a program and put it in X the way he could with Rock: X's systems would outright reject it. But perhaps if he composed an augmented defensive program, then offered it to X, the android would have the good sense to accept and install it himself.

It'd give him some teeth, at least. Give him something to defend himself with if he was attacked that way.

* * *

><p>Zero had grabbed his saber as soon as the voice on the screen had told him where to find it, though he hadn't placed it in its holster, preferring to keep the item at hand. The weight settled comfortably against his hand, incredibly familiar even though his mind was still trying to process the use of the name 'Zero' in relation to him. Resting one hand against his head as he ran, he mentally shrugged and set his personal assignment tag as Zero. If something came up later, if his memories restored themselves and provided him with a different name, he could always change the data. Pulling his pistol from its holster, he ran faster, handing the weapon off to Ciel as soon as he'd turned the weapon's light on. "Here, you need this more than I do right now."<p>

Looking around, the faint lights of the pistol's lights dancing across the remains of the Resistance members and the Pantheon units, X suddenly realized that he had no idea where there _was_ a Trans Server in the area, and with the power outage that had nearly shut down Sanctum Yggdrasil's server, it was likely going to need an external power source in order to actually get them out of the city.

"Blues," X called over his shoulder, now opting to move by flight alone. Though running didn't tire him out, it was still faster for him just to fly. "You can navigate the network. We need a Trans Server…a teleporter out of here. Anything in the area?"

Ciel looked over her shoulder for a split second before realizing that it was far more necessary to keep looking forward. "Why are you asking him?" Ciel asked. "Are you a maintenance crew member for this area?"

Milan and X were both shocked at the fact she had missed such glaringly obvious details. Neither were able to inform her of Blues' machine nature, however, as the robot at the rear of the group answered X's initial question.

"You want to teleport a _human_? I cannot permit that." Both literally and figuratively: unsafe didn't even begin to describe what teleportation was to organic life and even if it wasn't against his own personal moral code to do that to someone, the First Law most definitely would be up in arms.

That wasn't even something he'd argue with it about: of course he couldn't do that.

It took X a moment to realize that Blues had no idea about the technological advancements made since X's initial reactivation by Doctor Cain, nor the fact that teleportation technology _had _to be upgraded and made safe for humans in order to expedite the evacuation procedures used during Maverick attacks.

There was so much that he was going to have to tell Blues, X realized, the thought amending itself a moment later that he'd be doing the exact same for Zero. _Crap_.

"Trans Servers aren't like whatever teleportation equipment you're used to. There's been a lot of research done to modify them for human transit, and it's been in use for _years_ without any adverse effects."

"Why can't we just use the Trans Server they used to get in?" Zero asked, looking at the ethereal figure floating near him. "Wouldn't it be the most direct route to getting out?"

"It would be," Milan offered, "had the Pantheons not blasted our original way out of here into a pile of rubble. I don't want to wait around here while we try to dig past it all to get back to our Trans Server, and that's assuming the Pantheons didn't blast that to pieces too."

Blues was quiet for several moments, not more than five seconds, while he took that time to bring up Trans Server schematics and essays. To look it over to be certain that what X said was true. After all, if he was wrong? Well, X didn't have the Three Laws. Then he increased his speed, quickly moving to head off the group. "Follow me," he said. It'd been easy to locate the nearest Trans Server: it was deeper in, further down, but not far off.

Near the back of the group and realizing that he was now serving as rear defense, what with the immaterial figure next to him likely unable to provide support, Zero dialed up his audio receptors, slowing almost immediately after doing so. There were footsteps; focusing his attention, Zero could hear multiple steps, multiple units, on the move. Without the flashlights illuminating the corridor, he switched his optical input to night vision, dampening the input intensity as he pulled his saber handle to the ready position, body moving into a defensive stance.

The others began to slow, the human starting to move back towards him, and Zero yelled back at them, "Keep moving! I'll catch up as soon as I'm done here!" The familiar snap-hiss of his saber sounded through the corridor, bathing the nearby walls in a faint green light as it hummed softly. This…

This Zero knew. Battle he _remembered_.

The first trio of Pantheons spilled from a side corridor Zero hadn't noticed before, their singular blood red optics focusing on him as soon as they had entered the hallway, buster arms coming up to bear. With a soft hum, the units fired.

Moving to the right quickly, Zero dodged the first buster shot, deflected the second into a wall, and knocked the third into the face of the middle unit, its head exploding with a shower of sparks and melting components. Another volley was fired and Zero engaged his boosters, launching over the orbs of energy and planting his feet against the nearest wall. Jumping towards the Pantheons before hitting the floor and combat-rolling, Zero stopped just short of the units, his saber slicing cleanly through the torsos of both units, sending them toppling to the floor.

There were more units coming, these three likely advance scouts. Flicking his thumb against the activation switch for his saber, Zero pressed himself against the wall, hoping that the internal humming of his systems wasn't loud enough to attract unwanted attention. One by one, the Pantheons moved into the hallway, and Zero kept careful watch on the nine remaining Reploids, readying himself before once more activating his saber and diving into the fray, the Pantheons caught surprisingly unawares.

Ciel and Milan struggled to keep up with Blues' pace, following him as best they could. The sudden clang of metal being slammed aside rang around them, both pistol flashlights turned to the doorway where a group of Pantheons, some armed with busters, others stun rods, were emerging. Milan snapped off a couple quick shots, the first going wide and the second merely clipping one of the nearest Pantheon Guardians on the shoulder.

Ciel just stood there, light dancing nervously across the helmets of the Pantheons as one raised its buster to fire…

Blues grabbed the pistol and shoved her aside, knocking her down so she'd be hidden behind his body. He saw her hesitate and they didn't have _time_ to break her in to combat. The Pantheons fired and he had to twist to be sure Rock avoided the fire—it nearly knocked him off-balance—and he crouched down and shot once, twice, three times, directly into the Pantheons.

His shots finished off what Milan's began.

He tried to reach out to the remaining ones, tried to set them up not be shooting, but, Blues realized with a shock, these couldn't be reprogrammed. He knew that the human girl was curled up behind him still, probably shaking.

_Her safety is priority_, the First Law sang to him. _They forfeit their lives_. Another wave of anger passed through him, for these accursed, faulty laws. For forcing him to decide that human life was of more value than robotic life, for ensuring that they would forever be unable to view themselves as equal to humanity.

His entire body tensed up and he grit his teeth. It was too late to send these ones orders to convene elsewhere, too late to prevent their deaths. So he fired off several more shots before they could shoot him, before they could shoot the human.

Zero froze momentarily as the sound of buster and pistol fire echoed through the halls, and he sliced the head of the final Pantheon in half before taking off down the hallway, saber humming as he moved.

Milan moved again, trying to keep himself from sticking to one spot too long, his aim improving only slightly as he and Blues took down the last of the Pantheons. _Yep_, he told himself as he pulled the trigger, hitting the second-to-last Hunter in the neck, _I need to talk to Cerveau about modifying my battle programming. I'm not compensating fast enough. _He sighed heavily, the gun falling to his side as Blues finished off the last Pantheon. _Well, that and I need to hit the firing range and learn how to use a gun in my off-hand. This is ridiculous_.

X had moved closer to Blues, closer to Ciel, as the battle had continued, reflexively dodging the buster fire as he made his way to the human head of the Resistance. "Are you okay?" he asked as the last Pantheon fell to the ground. "You're not injured?"

"No," she said, her voice shaky. "I'm fine. I just…" She stopped, unable to voice what was wrong.

"It's okay," X assured her. "I shouldn't have sent you down here in the first place."

"You needed me here," Ciel countered. "We needed a technician."

Milan nodded. "We didn't know about Blues, and Cerveau isn't equipped for battle."

"Still," X said, shaking his head before turning back to Ciel. "C'mon, Ciel, we need to get moving before more Pantheons arrive."

Zero shot around the corner, boosters firing off as he banked hard into the hallway, righting him as he continued to run. "Is everyone okay?" he called out.

Blues scanned the girl reflexively, then scanned the others, checking for damage. He straightened up from his crouching position and shifted the bundle he was carrying, adjusting it so his weight was centered again. He leaned down and handed the pistol back to Ciel, the barrel pointing toward the ground.

He didn't yell at her or even frown at her this time.

He did shift to look at Zero when he approached, but he wasn't actually listening closely to Wily's android. Instead, he was issuing false orders to the Pantheons, and not even just the nearby ones. He moved soldiers around all over the city to keep them scrambling upstairs.

To keep them from guessing where they were.

X nodded at Zero. "We're fine."

"Good," Zero said, powering down his saber and placing it in the holster. "Let's get to that Trans Server before any more of those things suddenly think sewer crawling is a good idea."

"We're not in the sewers," Milan corrected, but backed away at Zero's exasperated glare. "Though you are right. Blues?"

"It's just ahead," Blues said as he turned and began moving down the hall again, but this time at a slower pace so Ciel could keep up easily. "We shouldn't see any more guards," he added, his head having that strange tilt again, as though he were listening to something.

After several more minutes of walking at a slightly more reasonable pace, they came up to a door. It was already open, its access panel showing all green even before they arrived.

The Trans Server was in the center of the room. Or, at least, Blues assumed that to be the teleporter. It didn't have a contained pod the way Doctor Wily's prototype teleporters did, but it did have a designated platform. The room was dark and even with night vision enabled, it was still a bit hard to see anything. There was a control panel along one wall, its buttons glowing dimly, causing a pale blue haze in the air immediately around them.

He reached out over the network, checking on movements and positions. Good: the Pantheons were headed to their false destinations.

X moved into the room quickly, looking towards the Trans Server's control panel, eyes falling quickly on the data port. Pressing his hand against the small indentation, his form broke into a countless array of variously-colored dots before delving into the system, reconnecting to the main network to ensure that the Trans Server was targeting the correct receiving platform.

…What in _blazes_ had Blues done to the network?

Blues felt X log in again, but this time he connected to the main network and not to the network associated with Zero's hibernation chamber. Blues was still calmly orchestrating everything, playing the network and the authority in Neo Arcadia like a fiddle. He'd chosen the tune and my, were they dancing.

He really didn't mind that X was there. Even if he was an admin, there was nothing X could do to counter Blues, nothing he could do to throw a wrench in the works. Because if X was an administrator here, then Blues was the engineer, the coder. Nothing was possible without Blues' express consent.

Neo Arcadia truly _was_ living on his charity.

So Blues just sat back and watched X just as intently as he watched the alarms, the troops' movements, communications, energy consumption (which was virtually nil with the power plant offline), watched X just as intently as he was reading 'top secret' documents and gathering intel.

He'd identified the other 'Guardians' and had all four of their IDs flagged as hostile in his systems, along with not-X.

* * *

><p>The Zan'ei unit let loose a powerful kick, knocking what was left of the door to the lift off of its track and stepping smartly aside to allow Phantom to exit the car, bowing in deference to his commander. Phantom addressed his subordinate as he strode quickly down the hall towards the nearest network terminal room. "What is the current status of the network, PZ59? Has there been any progress in determining the source of all the alarms?"<p>

"As of yet, no, General Phantom. The power failure is city-wide and none of the terminals are active. Even their internal and backup batteries are unable to power them." The stealth unit fell in step behind Phantom, following the Reploid. "Communications are down, but your units have been able to report in that several of the nearby alarms are all false. No attack has occurred in the areas that the Pantheons were dispatched to." He seemed almost afraid to voice the rest of his report. "We have also been unable to confirm the authenticity of the alarms the Golems reported to."

Phantom was genuinely puzzled, though his face was as blank as ever. "You mean to tell me that every alarm in the city is going off, but none of them are actually real?" They reached their destination, Phantom stopping short as another of his unit appeared from around the far corner of the hallway. The unit approached Phantom, bowing respectfully. "PZ83, I have a report that the city has been thrown into near total chaos by a cascade of false alarms. Do you have anything to add?"

"I do, General, though I am not certain of the correlation, if any. The analysis crew that was operating on the recently discovered models reports that both units have gone missing."

"I see. So there was one actual alarm in all the smoke. That means there must be a hacker, and a _good_ one, wrecking havoc on our network. We have to get this terminal powered _now_. We need a plan. Do either of you have any ideas, or shall we split up and look for some Energen Crystals?" Phantom desperately hoped there was at least a Mechaniloid nearby they could borrow a generator from, otherwise they were going to need a _lot_ of crystals.

PZ59 and 83 looked at each other, 83 pressing his hand against the other's arm, the electronic signal picked up by the subdural sensors. After a moment, 59 nodded in agreement, moving to the terminal as 83 looked around for a link cable.

Prying the cover off of the main battery casing, 59 started pulling wires, rearranging the configuration so that rather than maintaining a charge, the system would actively draw power off of a provided source. As 83 returned with the needed cable, 59 plugged one end into the second port on his neck, quickly stripping the cable's wires and resting against the floor as his partner hotwired the terminal.

With a sharp crackle of electricity and a soft hum, the terminal came to life.

Open shock flashed briefly across Phantom's face, an expression that would likely stick with the two Reploids for the rest of their operational lives. "_This_ was your great idea? Just how long do you plan to power _a network terminal_?"

59 answered from his prone position on the floor, "If my current energy expenditure rate is accurate, General Phantom, about forty minutes before my operations subroutines shut me down."

"I see." This meant that the network was up, just the terminal itself that needed power. "Then I'll make this quick." Phantom sat in the networking chair, taking the link cable that led into it and plugging it into the top port in his neck. He quickly entered his login information, and began to search for the culprit behind the theft of what may be their last chance to fix this energy disaster.

* * *

><p>'<em>Wait, you're telling me that <em>you're_ the one that started this mess in the first place?_' X was livid. Had it not been for the massive amounts of interference on the network when the alarms started blaring, he would have been able to keep a lock on the Pantheons that were trailing the Resistance. '_We lost seven good Reploids out there, Blues!_'

'_I'd have lost far more,_' Blues countered evenly, still eyeing the network, still managing the chaos on the surface. '_And that human girl would be dead had I not done this. She didn't even have the ability to enter Zero's room._' She couldn't even surmise why Zero's memory was lost. She froze up in battle, she'd have had her head blown off. And her guard was disabled. All of that would have happened regardless of Blues' actions.

X almost balked at the tone of voice that Blues had used, but any reply X may have had was cut off at the thought of that odd sack his eldest brother had been carrying around. Was there something of significance in there that X was missing?

'_That doesn't change what I said,_'X finally replied despite something telling him not to. '_If you claimed admin rights on the network, why didn't you recall the Pantheon squads that were sent down here? Why weren't they redirected off—'_ X stopped. Did Blues feel that, too?

There was another on the network, Blues was suddenly aware, and he turned to regard the newcomer. They'd logged in with valid credentials: Blues hadn't expected them to be quite so clever as to power a terminal themselves. Idly, he wondered how they'd rigged it to sustain itself long enough to secure a connection. He set off another alarm as he double-checked X's position on the net. To be safe, he moved the android to a more secure position, a place a bit closer to Blues' "nexus". Really, it was just where his effort and attention were most concentrated.

He had no origin point, no source, because he _was_ the network.

His systems went into a state of alert when he identified the newcomer. Hidden Phantom, one of the 'guardians' of Neo Arcadia.

_Clever._

Clever, but pointless. There was nothing he'd be able to do. He was wasting time and energy by coming here.

He wasn't even an admin, Blues noticed. His account was more synonymous with 'moderator'.

'_There is something that's been concerning me that I think you need to see to understand,_' Blues said slowly as his presence turned to face Phantom. He completely disregarded their previous thread of conversation in favor of this.

Blues didn't make any movements, didn't reach out toward Phantom, but Phantom was suddenly immobilized, suddenly caged so that he wouldn't be able to move around, wouldn't be able to try to tamper with anything else.

Or X.

He waited just long enough to feel X's dawning horror at what Blues had done before kicking the Guardian from the net, unharmed.

'_What the hell did you do to him?_' X screamed, familiar with the network's quarantine programs. What Blues had just done to Phantom was much like that…except about a thousand times more magnified in terms of security. X could barely think what that must have felt like on the receiving end.

* * *

><p>Phantom shot up from the terminal chair, screaming in pain at the pressure that had slammed into his digital energy signature, the sound magnifying as his motions ripped the link cable from his port. 59 quickly unplugged himself from the terminal, both of Phantom's units moving swiftly over to their leader, helping the shaking Reploid to his feet before sitting him back down in the chair, the Guardian's legs unwilling to carry his weight.<p>

"General Phantom," they asked, almost simultaneously, "are you alright?"

The Reploid was too busy to answer, too lost in his own mind at the wave of security alerts that had flooded his system as soon as he'd been ejected from the city network. Underneath all the warnings and worry, though, Phantom felt a greater trepidation eating at him, agonizing fear born of an impossible truth relinquished by the network.

_Master X? But…he's in the charger pod in his chambers, probably offline until the city is running again._

_Who is _running_ this city?_

* * *

><p>'<em>By his signal, I frightened him,<em>' Blues said simply, a sort of a mental shrug accompanied by it. '_I have some advice for you: if you're going to be fighting mind-to-mind, it's best to do it in someone else's mind so theirs is the one ruined by the struggle. However…if it is your mind that the fighting is happening in, it's better to use too much force on your opponent, lest they get loose and break your things._'

And it wasn't a good idea to have your things broken when those things were your mind.

'_That is considered a harmless defense to us._' The cage, the pressure, the immobilization. '_A kind action. Another Robot Master would have thought me considerate._' Well, considerate by Blues' standards. Though he wasn't offended that X thought he was being cruel.

'_That is something that you are acutely vulnerable to, and it concerns me._' He was worried for X. '_I am going to compose an augmented program for you, so that you may defend yourself against it._' Because of X couldn't break out of that? If he got caught up in a bid for dominance on the network, he'd be trapped indefinitely.

'_Wouldn't that require another Robot Master to be present?_' X argued. '_Or an android programmed in a similar fashion to one? Until now, with whatever happened in that city that brought you back, there are _none_ with that capability._'

Blues just smirked over the network. '_Currently._'

X stopped at that. Blues sounded almost…cocky. Shaking his head, he checked the transmission settings one more time. '_Just get everyone through to the base. You and I can discuss this…whatever it was when we get there and I'm off the network you're so concerned that I'm uploaded to._' The sarcastic overtones in X's last statement were hard to miss.

Blues didn't acknowledge X's sarcasm, but he did do something in the network that caused the transporter to whirr to life. Lights on the machine blinked as the system was brought online, the control panel's displays showing information. Blues brought up the coordinates that X checked and compared them to their current location. It wasn't that far out. Did the Neo Arcadian government really not know that they were out there?

Inept.

The Trans Server finally hummed fully to life and aloud, Blues said, "It looks like it's ready to go." As though X was the one that had done all of this and not him.

Milan was the first through, followed by Ciel, then Zero, and finally Blues. The Robot Master paused to lock the door behind them before stepping through. After he disappeared in a flash of shimmering light, the coordinates were wiped from the interface and the transporter powered back down.

They wouldn't be able to pursue this way.

X's data streamed from the machine, reforming for a moment into his elf form before his body began to fade, the former leader of Neo Arcadia relinquishing himself to the grip of Cyberspace for the moment. He could move from the city to the Resistance base almost instantaneously via this route, unique though it was to his particular Cyber Elf nature, but he opted to remain disconnected from the lower world for now. All of his time spent, all of the work done, had taken a great deal of his energy. He needed time to recover, to rebuild his energy levels.

Maybe then he'd be able to address the matter of Blues suddenly coming back from the dead.


	4. Looking to the Past

_ And here I was thinking it was pretty awesome to have 20,000 words in three chapters. And then I looked at this chapter and chapter 5. Both are over 11,000 words. Did I mention that this story is long? I'm delighted._

_ Here, we get settled back into the Resistance Base, Zero has a trip to the doctor's, Blues gets a tour of the facility, and X realizes that Blues' warnings do, in fact, hold some serious weight. We're sorry, X._

_ Remember, this story is a collaboration between HarunaRei and Midnyght Saber. Please enjoy._

_ And here I disclaim: we do not own Rockman, Capcom does. We're just here to play blocks with their 'verse._

* * *

><p>There were several Reploids waiting around the Trans Server when Zero arrived, three of which were already escorting Ciel and Milan out of the room. To where, Zero had no idea, but there was something extremely offsetting about him being left behind in a room full of people that looked at him as if he had just been dropped out of the sky by some higher power. Initial scans returned that every individual there was Reploid, and concern fluttered through Zero's systems at the thought that Ciel was, so far, the only human he had encountered. Something about that fact rang all wrong for him.<p>

Beckoning hands of a green-garbed Reploid had led Zero off of the Trans Server platform, and a soft hum filled the room as the machine whirred to life once more, Blues materializing out of the ether. Well, at least that explained why they were so intent on moving him.

"Mister Zero?" a soft voice called, Reploids moving aside as a small child stepped through the room. "Mister Zero, Cerveau told me to bring you to his room. Can you please come with me?"

Zero smiled comfortingly, taking the child's offered hand, a momentary hesitation when he realized that this child, like most of the others, was actually Reploid. Why was this world so overpopulated with Reploids when humans seemed all but extinct? Was that why Ciel had asked for his help, to save what was left of her race?

Cold, dull gray walls of metal ran for as far as Zero cared to look, broken only by the open-air lift that ran through the heart of this base. From the ambient temperature readings, this location was underground, which at least brought some small comfort to his systems. The rest of him was on alert, scanning the areas for weaknesses, looking for points of concern should Neo Arcadia continue their assault outside of the city. Even with Blues assuring them that no more Pantheons would be attacking them, his battle protocols were still active, his body tense and coiled to react.

* * *

><p>The Reploids looked to the second newcomer, more than a few trying to figure out what this person was <em>wearing<em>. Whispers of 'Who wears a _black_ lab coat?' fluttered from the back of the room, as others simply stared in confusion, yet others eyeing the item he carried with suspicion. Master X and Ciel were only supposed to be bringing back one…

Dande looked down, a message alert popping up on his peripheral screen, only mildly surprised that it came from Master X. Reading over the information, he nodded to himself, though the odd way he had been asked to handle the situation left him thinking he needed to talk to the commander whenever he returned to the base.

_Dande, we found a second unit during the raid on the city. His name is Blues, and it would meet with my approval for you to treat him as an honored guest. I know this is not part of your usual detail, but please find a room for him, and do allow him to make a choice as to what level of the facility he wishes to be quartered on. Also, please make a point that none of the individuals waiting for our return make any moves towards him or the item he carries. He may yet be on edge after our escape and I do not wish to have his welcome at the base be a negative one._

Pushing his way through the crowd, Dande bowed respectfully to the oddly-garbed Reploid. "Please follow me, Blues-dono," he said. "Master X wishes you welcome to our humble base and requests that I take you to your quarters." Turning, he hoped the Reploid would follow him as he made his way to the door that led out into the central corridor of the facility.

Blues looked Dande over, scanned everyone in the room as force of habit. He checked their systems for weapons or other peripherals. They were eyeing him with no small amount of suspicion—nothing new about _that_—but the one that stepped forward was asking him to follow.

He also noticed that there weren't any humans here. It was more than a little strange compared to what he was used to, but as far as security went, humans made terrible guards. Especially against anyone of mechanical nature.

Blues stepped down from the platform, his bundle still over one shoulder, his shield making a slight chinking sound with his movements. He wished they hadn't stripped his armor—he was acutely aware of how much of a disadvantage he'd be at in this confined, underground space.

Speaking of which, this network was far more secure than Neo Arcadia's. They even had different databases on separate networks. He hooked into the networks that dealt with communications, security, and surveillance. He didn't really care about what they'd been working on here, though he would need an inventory of what they had on hand as far as parts went. There were mechaniloids here, too, but he'd tinker with them later.

It took him three times as long to get into this network, but it was still far too quickly for their firewalls to react. Ah, this placed was well-built. Multi-leveled. And secure, especially compared to Neo Arcadia.

Honestly, a militaristic government and he'd _still_ been able to walk out?

The one that indicated him to follow looked him over with a sort of reserved curiosity. Being addressed with -dono made Blues suspect that X had sent a missive ahead of them to let them know there'd be an extra guest. So he inclined his head at the Reploid and followed him from the room.

Dande was thankful that the Reploid had begun following him without argument, remaining quiet until they'd reached the lift, linking into the lift's wireless system and signaling for the platform to move to their level. "I am not sure if you have been told this yet," he began, his voice respectfully quiet, "but there are six levels in our facility. There are quarters available on the second, fourth, fifth, and sixth levels. Master X requested that I allow you the freedom to choose your residence level and room."

Blues nodded and was quiet a moment, considering. "Which is the deepest level?"

"With our facility being underground, the sixth is." The lift slid down slowly, magnetic locks holding it steady on the current floor. "Would you like to pick your quarters now?"

"I think that would be best." He needed to get Rock somewhere safe, behind locked doors. "The sixth, then," he said. He'd prioritize repairing his own teleportation matrix, then begin working on getting Rock online: even if they did get swarmed, he'd have a quick out.

He noted that this Reploid was…almost in awe, but it didn't seem as though he was in awe of Blues. Something else, then? That was curious.

Moving onto the lift, Dande waited for Blues to board before sending a wireless signal for the sixth level, the platform moving smoothly downward. "Once we have your quarters selected, would you like an escort to Cerveau and Doigt's lab? I am unsure of your systems' condition and cannot tell if any damage was suffered during your departure from Neo Arcadia, so it is merely a suggestion in the event you would like to have a diagnostic completed or repairs made. If you prefer, however, I could simply provide you with the locations of the most-used facilities to allow you to acquaint yourself with the base."

He hoped the Reploid would take up his offer to visit Cerveau. That shield honestly looked like it had seen better days.

A visit to the lab? To be _worked on_? Out of the question. Blues frowned and his tone wasn't exactly hostile, but it left the impression that the subject of Blues being worked on was one that was never to be discussion again. "I'm fine."

Really, what he wanted was to settle Rock and get a chance to look at him, but for the time being, he'd have to deal with these human-style pleasantries.

It didn't take much to catch the tone of disapproval in Blues' voice, and Dande bowed his head. "My sincere apologies, Blues-dono. I did not mean to offend with my poorly-considered suggestion."

Blues glanced down at Dande from the corner of his eyes, a little surprised by the Reploid's tone. He also wasn't one to placate, so instead, "It doesn't matter." The Reploid hadn't known. Blues considered just sending the Reploid away once he reached his room and just pulling up the data he'd need to navigate the base, but he'd rather not deal with more prying than he had to.

And he knew that before long, X would be prying.

So he'd let this one show him around, or hand him a map, or whatever they did for newcomers, and be on his way after.

The lift slowed, then stopped, a soft thrum underfoot the only indication that the magnetic locks had engaged. Dande stepped off, waiting for Blues to do the same, and then continued down the hallway. "This level is mostly storage and member quarters, so it's relatively quiet down here most of the time. There are a couple of rooms here that are only equipped with a desk and a charger pod, but a greater number also have computer terminals that connect to our communications network and beds. Master X and Lady Ciel have been trying to do everything in their power to ensure that Reploids rescued from the city are made to feel more on equal footing here, even if Lady Ciel is the only human permanently residing at the base at the moment."

They reached the end of the corridor where it branched off in two directions. Dande pointed to the left. "The supply rooms are down that way, but it's probably best to ask Cerveau or Doigt if you need parts for anything since they are somewhat strict in terms of their inventory, especially with the increased number of raids into Neo Arcadia in recent weeks. Parts are still somewhat difficult to come by, even with undercover units stationed around the city. Turning to the right, Dande motioned to the doorways they passed. "Do you have a preference for your room?"

Bed? Oh, yes, that's right. Androids (and by extension, Reploids) need to sleep. Well, that could be useful. Blues didn't need a recharge capsule; he never ran low on power. He didn't need to sleep, but as a ruse… "A room with a bed would be good." Blues said, hoping that that'd move this along a bit more quickly.

He supposed it was hospitable of them to offer use of their labs, but if he actually asked for the parts, then the technicians would be able to look at what he was compiling and from there, possibly figure out what he was rebuilding.

And he would not permit them to work on Rock anymore than on himself.

The two continued on in silence, Dande's systems running a check against the room numbers to determine if they were currently occupied by another Resistance member and, if not, what furnishings were contained within. He stopped at one door on the right side of the hallway, verifying that the room was currently unassigned before keying in the access code, stepping aside and bowing respectfully.

"Here is your room, Blues-dono. I hope that it is to your liking. This room is also equipped with a scenery simulation display along the far wall, since I thought you may like something that didn't remind you that you were underground. If you'd like, I could activate it. It uses feeds from the external security cameras to control the lighting levels and replicates both day and night settings. It's…sort of a reminder to us of what Neo Arcadia was like before Master X's…failed copy destroyed it, of what we're fighting to restore." There was a deep melancholy in the Reploid's voice, though his eyes could not be seen through the large helmet that covered the top half of his head. The only change to his tone was the venom-laced mention of the false leader ruling from the city's throne.

Blues didn't miss the venom in Dande's voice and he made a note in his logs to look up more information on not-X. Had there been a coup?

That…Blues was willing to bet that some of the scenery he could load into this display would blow the Reploids in this base away. From what he gathered from the files he'd looked at in Neo Arcadia, the planet's biosphere was ruined by centuries of near-constant worldwide war. Blues thought that the planet would recover on its own over time, but for now?

He liked to travel and he'd seen a lot of things. He wondered what some of those places looked like now. Were they all hollow shells?

It was a novelty for morale, something to lift spirits. "I'll take a look at it later," Blues said as he stepped fully into the room.

He walked over to the bed and shifted his bundle in his arms, then gently, so gently, laid it on the bed. He didn't unwrap it, but he still handled it with utmost care. Then he took his shield and leaned it against the side of the bed, the base of the shield on the floor.

Then he tilted his head to look back at Dande, though his glasses obscured his eyes. "Can I see the supply rooms?" Having a look would be better than looking at the inventory and compiling a shopping list for the mechaniloids to retrieve: he could see the kind of quality they had here.

A small smile graced Dande's face for a fraction of a second before returning to the closest approximation of neutrality possible with half his features obscured. Bowing, he turned. "Right this way, Blues-dono."

* * *

><p>Cerveau sighed for the fifth time in as many minutes. When he first got Zero hooked up for an examination, he 'd been surprised at how high the Reploid's power levels were, even considering that the levels were still low overall. He commented about it to Ciel. He hadn't expected him to have this much after so long underground. Then Ciel got misty-eyed and her shoulders trembled a bit. It took Cerveau a minute to put two and two together, a minute to understand why Zero's energy levels would upset her.<p>

Nurse elves could raise energy levels like that in a pinch.

Except Ciel shouldn't have used it while he was still plugged in; she should have woken him first. It looked like a great deal of his memory was compromised during his hibernation, though how, he had no idea, but that surge really sealed the deal. His memories and his auto-repair systems were particularly damaged. He honestly didn't know how much he could do for Zero's memories.

They'd said he hadn't even remembered his own name.

Cerveau looked up at Ciel again, glaring a bit. She should have known better. She _did_ know better. How had that escaped her? Now Zero was more than a little bit broken and, honestly, they were lucky he could still walk and talk.

"I…" Ciel wasn't sure she _had_ an answer. Cerveau was right; she should have known better, should have realized. She'd been working on Reploid construction with her father since she was five, programming since nine. She was a quick study, a prodigy, even with her father's death at thirteen taking a heavy toll on her, both emotionally and in terms of her education. At fourteen, all she had learned had been put into effect. Now eighteen, here she was trying to correct one mistake and inadvertently had rushed and made another.

Her father's reminder to pull back from a project and _think_ before diving in head-first kept biting her in the rear every time she forgot or ignored it.

This mission was _important_. Waking Zero was _important_. He was a legendary war hero, a powerful warrior, and _Master X's best friend_. They'd fought together for years. Memories are what makes up a person. From what they'd reported, Zero remembered how to fight, but…

And what could Cerveau do? He could help with Zero's auto-repair, he could help with those systems but the android's mind? Was there even anything he'd be able to do to help Zero recover?

Cerveau sighed again at Ciel's whimper of a word; he knew she was sorry. He knew she was genuinely regretful, that she genuinely felt bad. It wasn't even an issue of that, it was…

She needed to think before she did things. She needed to take a few precious seconds so her rational mind could catch up to whatever part cooked up her ideas.

"Don't blame yourself."

Ciel looked up, wiping at the bottom of one eye, and found Zero looking at her, a soft smile on his face. "Wha…?"

"Don't blame yourself," he repeated. "The files are still there, despite all this. Compromised doesn't mean destroyed, doesn't mean deleted. You cannot hold yourself to such high expectations, especially with units such as those I fought hunting you, when you are not in the state of mind to take in the big picture, when you cannot focus." He blinked, ebony eyes moving around the room. "Where is the other one that was with us? The…" Zero couldn't find the proper word, didn't know the term. "The one in blue that gave me my saber."

One in blue? Oh, Cerveau realized, he meant Master X. "That was Master X." It was strange to think that Zero honestly didn't remember him. But if his files were only compromised and not permanently corrupted…

Then there was hope that they'd be restored. That would be a very wonderful thing.

"It takes a lot of energy for him to manifest here this way, so he has to rest up to recharge his power. He'll be back once he's revitalized." It was sad that elves worked that way, sad that Master X was confined this way, but…

But at least he was still alive.

"X…" Zero said, as if rolling the name around in his head to see if it triggered anything. "It…he is familiar, but I don't know how. It seems as if he knows me, though."

Cerveau smiled, although a little sadly. Yes, X did know Zero. "Yes." Though to say more than that? No, that conversation should be left to the two of them. "Honestly, it's a relief to see that you're up and functioning," even with his memory shot. Someone should have been maintaining the machine. They should have gotten down their sooner.

The door to the lab opened and Dande's voice could be heard. He was explaining what the lab was to someone and Cerveau looked back, curious. Dande and a Reploid Cerveau never saw before walked in. He…what was he wearing? Was that a black lab coat? But it…it was designed so _strangely_. His entire ensemble was…

He'd never seen clothing that way. Was he not wearing armor? Cerveau scanned him, just to be certain. Yes, he was not a human. He was not squishy, he was mechanical.

And he was wearing sunglasses. Indoors.

Cerveau looked to Dande questioningly.

"Cerveau, this is Master X's honored guest. Blues-dono, this is our lead technical advisor and mechanic, Cerveau," the Reploid introduced. "He asked to see the facility, so I'm providing as good a tour as I can, considering."

Okay, that gave Cerveau pause. _Honored_ guest? That meant that Master X gave Dande some specific instructions. That…was incredibly rare. That was what Master X would do for someone like Ciel, for someone whose life and wellbeing were everyone's interest. He'd heard that a newcomer came back with the group in addition to Zero, so he must be it.

And dressed so strangely…Cerveau knew that he really shouldn't judge, but wasn't there practicality to consider?

Ciel felt a small well of laughter building in her at the thought of Dande leading anyone around the base as part of a tour. He was one of their senior surveillance officers, the odd helmet-like contraption on his head, providing real-time feeds from all the surface-level cameras around the base. Only a small section of that visor provided a view of the outside world, and that was a world that Dande did not spend a lot of time in. He, like most of the others, had only left his normal post on the second level to welcome back the Resistance leaders and welcome their newest member.

X must have sent a message of sorts through for him to be leading Blues around the base.

"It's good to meet you," Cerveau said with a nod and a smile. It was odd that Dande didn't bring this one to the lab straightaway for a checkup. There had to be a reason for that.

Cerveau was Ciel's foil in that he actually_ did_ pay attention to his surroundings.

Blues' body language was closed off, though not impolite. So a handshake wouldn't be prudent. "This is my main lab, though there are several laboratory facilities on this level." Cerveau gestured around the room at the mention of it being his space. It was surprisingly neat in there, all considered, though there were still tools and various parts lying about.

Blues was…irritated. Not with Dande, Cerveau, or anyone in this base. Really, it had nothing to do with them, but he couldn't help but think…

No, it'd be best not to dwell on that right now.

Instead, he nodded to Cerveau when he was greeted. The Reploids communicated the way humans did, so even though that sort of body language wasn't exactly natural to Blues, he could emulate it perfectly to send the messages he wanted.

A faint white light shimmered in the far corner of the room before growing larger, extending outward into an ovoid shape, X stepping out of the portal. "Sorry for the delay," he said, turning and smiling softly at Blues. "I hope you have been made welcome here, Blues," he said, looking towards Dande.

Blues nodded. "Of course." Yes, he had. He was set up and in all honesty, his patience for all of these niceties was quickly waning.

"Master X," Zero said softly, sitting up in the pod without removing the cord, bowing his head in deference. "It's good to see you again."

X blinked for a moment. _Master X?_ he thought, honestly surprised that the Reploid referred to him with his honorific attached. It tugged a little at him that his friend did not recognize him, and he moved closer to the pod, hesitantly leaning forward and wrapping his arms around the blonde in a loose hug.

Zero blinked. The arms around him were there, but at the same time weren't. The touch against him felt like a soft bristling of electric energy, but there was no weight, no warmth. This was wrong, he knew; this wasn't how X was supposed to be.

Pulling away, X looked to Cerveau. "How is his analysis looking?"

Cerveau stepped toward some of his displays and motioned toward one in particular for X to look at. "There was a…power surge when he was awakened. His memory files were already compromised before, as far as I can tell, but the surge really…didn't help." More like made it five times worse. "And there are several other systems affected, namely the one that governs his auto-repair."

While the others were occupied with Zero and his status, Blues stepped back, then slipped silently from the room. There was something he needed to do.

X grimaced at the thought. While this was not Zero's original body, his auto-repairs were still by far one of the most advanced versions ever constructed, so for them to have been affected… "Were his auto-repairs already compromised like his memory files, or was this solely because of the surge? And when did this happen anyway?"

Ciel blanched at X's question, honestly hoping the normally calm elf wouldn't explode at her when he found out that Zero's condition was her fault.

Cerveau hesitated for a moment. "I…haven't seen any evidence that his auto-repair ability was damaged before the surge, but with the mechanism that was supposed to be maintaining him slowly breaking down, most of his systems have been negatively impacted." The surge, though? Was the icing on the cake. Sealed the deal. "The surge happened during the activation procedure. His energy levels were low—too low to really function, he'd not have been able to stand—and then his energy levels jumped."

Cerveau really didn't think that Ciel deserved to be yelled at, but he still needed to tell Master X the truth. "A Nurse Elf would have been able to power his systems so." Cerveau did his best to not glance at Ciel as he said this, even though he had a feeling Master X would know anyway.

Somehow, he always knew.

X resisted the urge to sigh, though it certainly was a tempting offer. Holding himself steady, he closed his eyes for a moment, letting the sudden rush of hurt and anger die down before he turned to face his co-commander. "Ciel," he began, his voice not offering anything in the way of admonishment, "you used a fully-matured Nurse Elf on him?"

Ciel nodded mutely. How could she even begin to apologize to him for this mistake?

If it wasn't losing herself in her work, Ciel was easily stressed to the point that focus was almost a moot point with her. Either end of that wide spectrum and she was a lost cause to her work or the Resistance. Honestly, X preferred it when she lost herself to her work. Someone usually ended up having to go in there and remind her that she had to eat, but at least then she was getting constructive things done. Stressed? No one would be able to ask her to boil water without something going wrong. He really had made a mistake sending her down into the chamber after Zero.

X rubbed his fingers against the bridge of his nose for a minute before looking at the human. He could tell she was really holding back the urge to either scream profuse amounts of apologies at him or cry, and he really didn't want her to do either. "You've been doing a lot of research with the Energen Crystals and the elves' ability to manipulate that energy through activation of their latent abilities. Is there any chance that you could do a side assignment for me?"

At this, the girl brightened up, looking for all the world like a puppy that just heard the word 'treat'.

"I want you to see if anyone around the base has a spare memory unit, something small but not too much so. Run some tests that mimic what happened to Zero and see if you can figure out a way to reverse or repair the damage. Can you do that?"

No one in that room had seen Ciel move so fast in _months_.

Zero laughed. "I take it she's a bit of a workaholic?"

Cerveau smiled and shook his head: Zero had no idea. "What's good about her doing research is that she doesn't just find what she was looking for. If she's really focused," and she would be, "she'll find ten different things." Not all would be useful, but…well, some of their more off-the-wall bits of technology were from that sort of brainstorming.

As were some of their more ingenious facets of technology.

He was glad, really, that X turned this into a positive thing for Ciel. Not that this hadn't burned her; it had, but this way it'd be able to be turned into something constructive.

X laughed softly, nodding at Cerveau in agreement. "If nothing else, it'll at least keep her from getting too down on herself about what happened. She's got enough on her plate in that regard as it is."

"What do you mean?" Zero asked.

X stopped for a moment before replying. "I think that's a conversation for you and me to have a future date. Right now, with your memory so affected, it'd either take far too much explaining or just sail right over your head."

"Don't think that just because my memories are damaged that I'm going to forget that," Zero said, his tone lilting just enough to crack a fresh smile on X's face.

"I'll keep that in mind," he returned. "Cerveau, are you going to need to keep Zero any longer? It doesn't seem like there's much we can do until Ciel comes back with something."

Cerveau shook his head and checked over the data once more, just to be certain. "No, aside from those issues, he's healthy. Zero, I'd suggest charging for a bit. I think you'll feel better if you get your power levels normalized." Despite sleeping in that pod for so long, his charge was so low, like it was doing just enough to allow him to stay alive.

Zero nodded. "We can talk more later, Master X?" he asked.

X nodded, though the mirth was a little subdued at Zero's continued use of his honorific. "I'll be back as soon as Cerveau gives you the all-clear to leave. We can go pick a room for you then, if you'd like."

"I'll see you in a little while, then," Zero said, leaning forward and letting Cerveau disconnect him from the diagnostic pod. "I'm guessing I just plug up in the pod next to where Milan's charging?"

Cerveau helped Zero get the plugs from his ports and nodded, "Yes, it'll take a couple hours, but still much shorter than a human's sleep cycle. I think that once your power levels are at a healthy level, you'll only need to charge for an hour or two. Your systems are very efficient, so you may not even need to do it as often." Really, the way he was built was amazing. Cerveau did something on one of his interfaces and the pod beside Milan slid open.

Zero hopped down, offering his saber and pistol to Cerveau. "Alouette told me that you tinker with weapons. Mind taking a look at these? I have no clue when the last time I did any sort of maintenance was, so it may be a good idea in case I'm asked to join any of the future raids." Moving for the pod, Zero laid down, plugging the charger cable in as he nestled into the pod.

X watched Zero with something akin to surprise as he handed his weapons off, specifically shocked by the fact that he was so willing to part with his saber. "If you don't mind," X said to Cerveau after Zero's pod had slid shut, "it doesn't bother me to let you work on the pistol, but leave the saber alone. I'll walk him through maintenance for that later on."

Cerveau seemed a little bit startled that the weapons were handed off to him, but it was more of a sense of awe that they were Zero's than it was surprise that the android would hand them over. "Of course, Master X." Cerveau wasn't offended; that saber had a lot of history and, really, it'd be better if Zero learned to maintain it himself anyway, in case something happened when he wasn't at the base. "I'll make sure the pistol is in good working order," he promised X.

"Okay, well, until Zero's finished here, Blues, I…" X turned, shocked that his eldest brother was no longer in the room. _When did he leave?_ "Dande, what room did you assign Blues to?"

"Room fourteen on Level Six," Dande returned quickly. "Master X, with your permission, may I return to my post?"

"You may," X said. "Thank you for your help." Once the Reploid had left the room, X turned to Cerveau. "As soon as Zero's showing green across what boards he can show green for, send a message out to let me know. If nothing else, someone will find me," since this form didn't have the wireless access that would have allowed for direct messaging.

Cerveau nodded: of course he'd notify X. "I'm projecting at least four hours' charge time, but he may stay in a bit longer if his systems begin maintenance routines. I'll let you know as soon as he initiates the end to his maintenance cycle." The status change would be flagged by the systems and sent to Cerveau as a priority: he wouldn't miss it.

"Thank you," X said before walking from the room, quickly heading for the lift. He passed several of the Resistance members as he walked, thankful that they'd finally broken the habit of bowing to him everywhere he went. Sure, the respect was nice, but it was far easier to show it simply by addressing him with an honorific. They had better things to be doing than fearing a reprimand for not showing obeisance to their commander.

Copy X really had done a number on the Reploid population.

As he rounded the corner that led to the lift, he smirked and huffed out a soft sigh. The lift had just moved past his level, likely moving for the level the Trans Server was on. Shrugging as he reached the lift shaft, X let himself fall through the emptiness to the bottom floor of the base, hovering for a bit before returning his feet to the floor. Although it would have been easier to just pass right through the floor, needlessly startling the Resistance members was something he preferred to avoid. Turning right, he quickly made his way to Blues' quarters, reaching out with his energy just enough to trigger the door to open.

When it remained closed, X's brow furrowed at the thought that Blues had locked the door. _That_ would definitely ring odd with the Resistance. Reaching out again, his energy brushed against the systems, setting off the small chime within the room that alerted the occupant that he had a visitor.

Blues had been running systems diagnostics nonstop now that he didn't have to worry about being captured or randomly attacked, checking over every line of coding in his system, every peripheral, requesting logs and status reports for every facet of his systems. The components that should be in Rock's body fit in his, yes, but they were just as aged as everything else.

Really, what should have happened in that lab was a full, comprehensive repair. With new parts.

Instead, they ordered Rock to death. Blues had no doubt that he would have followed shortly thereafter had that not-X had his way.

Either way, his wireless was up and running, but his teleportation matrix wasn't. His self-diagnostics also reported that some of his parts were edging toward not being so green any more.

He knew that if they opened him up, they'd realize he wasn't a Reploid right away. And that wasn't even his biggest worry.

After seeing the security in Neo Arcadia (or more accurately, the complete lack thereof), Blues wasn't going to make any assumptions about the setup here. He wanted to see it. He needed to know if he needed to make changes, he needed to know the weak points so he'd know what to expect. He was having a hard time believing that Neo Arcadia honestly hadn't found this base, so if there were spies? If there was surveillance? He needed to know _yesterday._

He'd been using the computer terminal in his room to see if they'd even notice a manual hacking attempt. They hadn't so far, but he suspected that his methods were far more advanced than anything they were accustomed to. His hands paused over the keyboard when the door chimed.

He debated closing off what he was doing, but decided against it. With a thought, he gave the door permission to unlock and open.

X mentally sighed when the door slid open, stepping inside, not at all surprised to find his brother sitting at the computer terminal, his shield against the wall near his bed, his coat idly thrown over whatever it was that he'd been carrying out of Neo Arcadia. The door slid shut behind him, and X remained near the doorway, mind spinning with a million questions.

He had no idea where to begin.

Blues kept typing for a few moments more, but paused when X didn't come fully inside. Oh, right. Manners. Blues spent his early years with Doctor Light, that was true, but the bulk of his life was spent living alone and acting like a _Robot Master_, not carrying on a humanlike charade.

So he paused in what he was doing, then scooted back from the terminal and shifted to turn his body so he was facing X more than the computer. Blues had questions of his own and he looked X over again, frowning slightly. His sunglasses hid the concern that flickered through his eyes.

X opened his mouth to speak, closing it again after a moment when he realized he had almost asked seven different questions at once. Looking around for a chair, he realized that there had only been one in the room to begin with and Blues likely hadn't been expecting company. Reclining back, he let himself hover a couple feet above the floor, crossing his legs under him and straightening out his robes. He played with the immaterial cloth for a moment, eyes diverted from his brother's gaze.

The minutes stretched on before X finally dared to look up, meeting the reflective gaze of Blues' glasses. "Where do I even begin?"

Blues was silent for a few moments longer, both units at a loss. Then, he spoke up, breaking the silence. "Why don't we begin with the…current situation. With that city, this base," Blues gestured around the room, but meant the facility as a whole, "what happened to _you_." His body. Where was his body?

X smiled, though the expression was more pained than mirthful. "It scares me to admit that a more appropriate question would be what _hasn't_ happened to me." He shook his head softly. "That city is all that truly remains of our world, our people, human and Reploid alike. Sure, we've got floater colonies here and on the orbital facilities, but past that? Neo Arcadia was supposed to be a city that heralded hope, that gave everyone somewhere to go until our…until the reclamation crews could start repairing other areas, building biodomes in an effort to try and save this world. This base," he continued, "was once an underground laboratory facility. We've converted it to serve as our base of operations until something can be figured out to address the major problem in Neo Arcadia, especially with all the work Ciel's been doing on creating an alternative energy-production mechanism to back up and supplement the existing power systems in the city."

X's eyes fell once more, his fingers worrying the red threading that formed the cross motif on the front of his clothing. "It's…a far longer story about what's happened to me."

"You've been active for a long time. I can tell just by talking to you, just by watching you. Doctor Light built you to grow and mature, built you to find your own path. Someone…a different human told me once that men try to carve their names into the Earth. And in response, the Earth leaves an equally deep mark in _them._" That in making an impact on the world, an impact is made on you. "It was odd to hear him say something like that, then laugh." Blues frowned and tilted his head, evidently still puzzled by the memory.

He supposed that Doctor Cossack had been correct; life does suck, but for him to still remain so positive after what he'd seen? The perspective had been useful.

X nodded. "Counting my time now, even with my…current nature, I've been active for well over two centuries. I'm probably as surprised as the few who still remember enough to know me that I haven't become terribly jaded by my experiences, especially with everything that I've been forced to go through." A snide laugh, more a snort, came from him. "To be honest, part of me hopes that Zero never recovers his memories. He's better off being a blank slate that knows only what he needs to of his history."

Ah, so life hadn't been kind to X or Zero, either. Well, of course it hadn't. From day one, the Robot Masters had been pulled along in humanity's wars and conflicts. Why would it be any different for the androids?

"I was able to access some historical documents from Neo Arcadia's network, though that wasn't…my highest priority. I haven't reviewed them all yet," and they may not all be pertinent, "but I gathered that Zero's been active roughly the same amount of time as you." He'd searched documents for X and then Zero when Blues realized what the 'legendary Reploid' was.

"I also gathered that war has been near-constant since…for the last few centuries." And that was what ruined the biosphere. "What happened?" To X, to Zero, to this planet. To humanity, who Rock fought so hard to protect.

That was not something X really wanted to go over, those wars, the losses, the sheer atrocity committed by his own kind. He sighed. "The Maverick and Elf Wars," he said. "Part of me wonders how much I am to blame for the first war." He fell silent for a moment, trying to figure out how to explain it all to his brother without the robot getting unnecessarily pissed off at Zero. Zero had, after all, been a victim of circumstances outside of his control.

"Doctor Cain found me over a century after I had been sealed in that pod by Doctor Light, and we…we started going over my schematics, my designs, what of my programming could be deciphered. We started building new androids by hand based off of that information. 'Replicated androids', we'd called them, or 'Reploid' for short. There were only a few in the beginning, test models to see if the technology worked. Most of the robotic population at the time was construction and maintenance mechaniloids, and Reploids were designed as an extension of that workforce, as managers for the machines. We'd had glitches pop up in the programming code here and there, minor issues that were patched or debugged, most of them minor, but it was determined that, in the interest of human safety, a group of Reploids would be built as a security and response force to keep the bugged units from getting too out of hand. One of the Reploids built then included a combat model named Sigma, designed as such because we needed a Reploid capable of taking down large-scale construction mechaniloids.

"There was never anything too serious wrong with any of the units, but all of a sudden, we started dealing with mechaniloids that were going on rampages, and these were causing serious damage to the cities and human fatalities. The mechaniloids that did this were labeled irregulars, since they were operating outside of the regular behavioral patterns and weren't responding to control signals from their managers." X shuddered at the thought of one of his earliest irregular cases and the Reploid that had only survived the conflict courtesy of Sigma's quick work with his saber.

"Then the real trouble started. We started dealing with irregulars in the Reploid ranks, units that were later dubbed Mavericks because these members of our forces were using their positions as a weapon against other Reploids, against mechaniloids, against _humans_. Doctor Cain had based these things off of me and they…they were killing _innocents_." X stopped for a moment. "When the source was finally found, when we realized what was causing the problem…Sigma nearly killed me to prove his point, that we were the next step of evolution for this planet, that we were meant to subdue and control the humans."

Memories of that fight flickered through his mind, memories he forced back down. "Sigma…was using a virus to overwrite the programming in mechaniloids and Reploids. It worked devastatingly well with the mechaniloids, but when he'd gone after Reploids? The virus bypassed all the defenses, including their anti-virus programming, tried to reprogram them, which activated the security protocols against reprogramming, which then got attacked by the virus. It took us ten wars and several decades before we ever managed to find a cure."

Blues just stared at X. For several long moments, all he could do was stare in disbelief. Even with the sunglasses hiding his eyes, it was obvious that Blues was _dumbstruck_. Dumbstruck, frustrated, and oddly, disappointed.

"You…made _people_ based off of your programming, then _bastardized _the very defensive protocols Doctor Light gave you to keep you safe from reprogramming, and then _reprogrammed _them? And you were _surprised_ that they were susceptible?" X didn't have any firewalls or defensive programs that dealt with outside tampering because that should have been impossible.

Doctor Light included a warning about that, hadn't he? For whomever found X?

Or had he not foreseen that possibility? A wave of irritation at the late doctor now: Doctor Light saw the destruction order coming, knew that the Robot Masters would run out of time. That's why X was hidden. He should have told his maker to make it clear that neither X nor his programming could be used to make any sort of unit that could function like a Robot Master, that reprogramming any portion of X's coding was an impossibly _bad_ idea. Humanity would have missed them: the Robot Masters took up a lot of slack from humanity. With them gone? Humans hated the loss of convenience.

Of course, Blues thought bitterly, that wouldn't have stopped someone from trying anyway.

"Wait, bastardized what? How can you even think that using only thirty-seven percent of anything can equate with bastardizing it? And we didn't reprogram anything!" X was honestly shocked at Blues' reaction. Didn't he know that X, and by extension Reploids, were unable to be programmed? That fact alone is what gave the Maverick Virus a footing—when the security measures went active to counter the reprogram attempt, the Virus then attacked and corrupted whatever information it could reach before overwriting the damaged data. It was why normally sedate units became killing machines, why once-sane units lost themselves to bloodstained insanity after they were infected.

That was why it was so hard to develop a cure. They weren't just getting rid of a bug; they had to force a damaged system to restore back to a previous state when the very files that would allow for restoration risked being as damaged as everything else, as corrupted as the rest of their data.

"How were we supposed to know that a virus would be able to bypass firewalls by directly attacking those very security measures? Nothing prior had been able to do it. Do you even realize what kind of testing _I _underwent before we even started producing first-gen Reploids? Blues, I was subjected to every known virus, worm, Trojan…they had programmers and hackers develop _new_ digital threat agents just to test me!"

"Thirty-seven percent? Thirty-seven percent of _what_?" Blues' head was tilted in a very human gesture, his voice still a bit sharp, though he didn't exactly snap at X.

"Thirty-seven percent of my _programming code_. The other sixty-three was completely undecipherable."

What else would X have been talking about?

"_You were only able to make sense of thirty-seven percent of it?_" Blues could hardly believe it. Thirty-seven percent? Where had all the programmers of the world gone? How was it that X himself understood so little about his own systems?

"If you think that's so terrible, we only ever got twenty-nine percent of Zero's." X moved to his feet again, hands fisting at his sides. "Why are you so shocked by this? Are you saying you could have done better?"

Blues was frowning at X now. "If I could not have done better, then I would be completely inept at what I'd been made for." He shifted now to fully face Light's youngest creation. "I'm a Robot Master. How do you think that robots could do all they could in our time? Where do you think _your_ movement programming comes from? Much of your programming is derivative of ours. How do you think that swarms of _hundreds_ of robots could work in harmony to erect a single skyscraper with only _one_ master directing them? How do you think they got around anything their programming wasn't equipped for? Who do you think was going unit by unit, adjusting their programming?"

X deflated at that. Sure, the memories from his construction hadn't been too damaged by a century in a pod, but the world around him?

"Blues, no one from when I was activated knew how anything got done in your time. There were no Robot Masters to learn from, no records of how so much was done in so little time. All…all the Reploid programmers were humans."

"…There are no records? They…" Blues looked angry now; he was almost vibrating with it. "The victors truly are the ones that write history, aren't they?" That was said with no small amount of venom as he glanced over toward the bed, toward his shield and the bundle. Blues was beyond yelling, screaming, or ranting. His voice was quiet, low, and even, the way that people got when their anger was beyond words, beyond what they knew how to express.

"There was very little," X admitted, not daring to continue further. He could almost feel the rage radiating off of his eldest brother, and he visibly shrunk back, pulled against the far wall. True, physical damage could do little to him in this form, but emotional damage? Verbal assaults? Their sting had not been lessened by the sacrifice of his body. His form, affected by his unease, shimmered and dimmed a little.

Blues seemed to catch himself then and became still, more relaxed. X didn't need to know that he'd just switched off another portion of his emotional display. "Forgive me," he sighed, forcing himself into a position that humans took to be more open, more friendly.

The ones who had done this to him, to all of them, were long gone, dead and in the ground. Dust. There was no use holding onto his rage, even though…

It could have helped the world, they all wanted to help, it was what they were made for, and instead…

"I assumed that more…knowledge had been passed on." He was sorry.

"Forgive me," X said softly, moving back into his hovering position, though he retained his distance. Eyes flickered over to the bundle on the bed before he looked back to his brother. "I did not mean to anger you. It's just…before the Maverick Wars, I was the only one who knew anything substantial about the world before my time, my activation." His eyes dropped, turned to the right, looking away from everything in Blues' room to gather himself, to center, and his form reflected that, solidifying somewhat.

Now was as good a time as any to change the subject, to address something else that had come up. "This is the second time that Zero has awoken with no memories of his past. Even…even though his programming data, what we could figure out, is older than even mine." He snorted again. "You'd think him being put into a new body would have meant that he didn't have to lose himself again, especially when who he was before is so vital to our survival now. Although there are things about him that…bothered the other Maverick Hunters, I cannot understand why _you_ don't trust him."

"I am familiar with the project he originates from," Blues said simply. "Doctor Wily was an excellent roboticist, but…well, neither he nor Doctor Light could keep up with any of us, not when we really wanted to find something out." It'd really been no contest.

That shouldn't have come as such a surprise to X. Blues had, after all, been around when he and Zero were being built. He honestly hoped that Blues would at least wait and listen, hear him out, realize that there was more to this question than X's tone might or might not imply. "How much more do you know about him than I do?"

Blues smirked. "Given that you fought alongside him for decades, I'd say that you know more than I as to _whom_ he is. As for _what_ he was intended to be?" The smirk disappeared from Blues' lips. "Trust isn't something to be given away freely." Not when the world threw it away so quickly.

X nodded. "He was meant to be a pawn in someone else's game without a voice with which he could dissent." Zero was only an android that could not be trusted if he were judged by his maker alone, by what he had been meant to do. "That much tells me you're aware of his history, but that you know nothing of his past." The hours of reconstruction in the labs after Sigma had brought him back from the ruins, the months of being shunned by fellow Maverick Hunters when we could not remember the reason why, the years of fighting against the injustice caused by a sickness he never had any choice but to carry.

Blues was aware of the inherent danger Zero posed to himself, X, and Rock. That was enough reason not to trust him. But he nodded to X: he wasn't there when Zero was first activated. "I can't push into an android's mind and look through their memories," the way Robot Masters could each other's. "I know what was intended for him, the same way I know what was intended for _you_. I…know the circumstances that prompted both of your creations," had lived it, "but don't think that Zero was the only pawn in this game: we were _all_ pawns. _You_, X, were the first who was built with the intent of choosing his own fate." None of his older brothers and sisters had that luxury.

"There's more you're not telling me," X said. That much he could tell by Blues' voice; the robot was guarding himself, guarding something. "For you to see us all as pawns tells me there's something Doctor Light refused to tell me, refused to let me know about." His eyes turned to the bundle on the bed again. Would it be unwise to ask about it? Blues had been all too protective of it on the way out of the city.

That in and of itself was curious. Had Blues been in the city and X just not known about it? Were it not for Blues identifying himself when X was uploaded into his network, he wouldn't have even known his eldest brother was in command of said network. Or was there more that Blues kept hidden behind those sunglasses than just his eyes?

"It doesn't really matter, does it?" If Blues saw X look at the bundle on the bed again, he didn't show any concern. But perhaps he'd said too much. Did X truly not know anything about how it'd been for his older siblings? Actually, that wasn't surprising. Doctor Light wouldn't have wanted to burden X with that. By the end there, Doctor Light knew, just as Doctor Wily did. And then Doctor Wily passed away and it really got…

Yes, Blues decided, he was glad that X wasn't awake then.

"I suppose not," X agreed. "I'm not ideological enough to think that anything I do now can change the past. I can wish that things were different, sure, but I've already been made far too aware that what's important is making the best of what I have in the time I have." Perhaps his age had made him a bit of a cynic, but was he really supposed to remain optimistic and childish when the world began to fall apart around him?

He sighed. "Zero was the reason we were able to end the Maverick Wars," he stated plainly. "We derived the cure from his data. We ended the Wars because he willingly put himself in stasis and allowed our scientists to study him, to try and decode him, to shunt his soul into another body." X tried to keep himself steady. "He's also half the reason we won the Elf Wars. I know simply laying out his accolades will do nothing to change your opinion of him, not without actually getting to know him, but…" he's not evil and he doesn't deserve your scorn. "Please just give him a chance."

Blues actually _laughed_. Not at X, oh no. Not derisively. "You…you sound just like him." It was…it was a strange feeling, to see them seem so alike. He supposed that, in the family, he was the odd one out. "Did you know that during every war, for every other Robot Master he encountered, he would first plead with them to not fight? He'd always…ask for peace first, even if he knew they'd refuse him. He never stopped…he never stopped _hoping_ for it." Blues had had to train him during the third war because Wily's bots were getting better and Rock was still far too reluctant. By the third war, it wasn't a game anymore.

"Sound like who?" X asked, before the name surfaced in his mind. There were other siblings, other robots, he knew, that Doctor Light had built, but he was almost positive about the one Blues had just compared him to. "Perhaps I do." Another smile, more genuine this time. "Maybe more so than you realize," X said. "I've always hated fighting, hated violence. During the seventh war, I completely bowed out, placed myself on administrative duties and refused to raise arms against the Mavericks, but…I never stopped believing that we'd find a cure, find a way to stop the destruction. Never thought it would be us," Reploids and humans as one cohesive group, "that would lose." Even with the price that had to be paid for the Wars to end, for the very freedom and peace he'd so desired.

Blues hadn't thought about the Wily Wars in terms of winning and losing: if Wily won, they lost. If humanity won, they lost. There _wasn't_ an out for the Robot Masters. Blues shifted in his chair. The idea of humanity fighting _alongside_ robots (Reploids) rather than against them? Humanity treating them as equals instead of as…instead of as tools, as appliances? It was a shock. Blues still couldn't quite…come to terms with it. All of that grief, all of that pain…

X spoke as though humanity and Reploid-kind won, but by the state of the world? Who'd really won here?

He had to admit to himself that part of why he could even appear relaxed (even though he wasn't) was because X had a very limited ability to interact with physical objects. Blues doubted he could pick Rock up, let alone unwrap him to find out he was inside. And with the door locked with a code he'd programmed in, with alarms triggered to alert him if someone tried to force the door?

It wasn't paranoia if they really were out to get you.

X stood once more, moving for the doorway before stopping. "I don't want to sound like I'm pushing or that I'm out of line, but I think it may be for the best if you were able to find somewhere to offer your services, your help, within the base. It's going to be odd enough for the Resistance members to find out that you lock your door when not a single one of us does, and I really don't want any more people pressing me for information than I have to deal with normally," especially considering that word had already gotten around the base that 'Blues-dono' was an honored guest of Master X's, "and I want it to be kept between us that you and I are related, and that you're as old as you are, at least until you feel more comfortable," more willing to trust them as X already did, "and can let them know yourself."

X hazarded a step towards Blues. "I know what you can do with the network, what you are _for_ the network, but I don't know if that would be the best thing for you to bring us. You…aren't willing to let the world know you're a Robot Master, and I can't fault you for that. You think so much faster than any of us are capable of, so much more like a machine than we do even though we're machines too, and I don't want to have to make you deal with him prying into your personal affairs and your history. I know how…bothersome that can prove, and without you telling me what exactly happened in Neo Arcadia, I'm not going to make a fool of myself guessing why you're so" caged up inside "unwilling to talk to people." He took another tentative step, realized that he was probably getting too close to violating Blues' comfort zone, too close to stepping inside of his bubble of personal space, and stopped once more. Why was it so hard to simply walk over and hug him? This was his _brother_ and he felt as if there were walls between them anyway.

Blues agreed with X about finding something to do in the base. He wasn't one for being idle and he needed to gather information. He was on the network whether X thought he should be or not, but he wasn't asserting himself over it, wasn't taking control. He was letting everyone continue as they normally did, completely unaware of the new presence on their security server. All he needed was to be able to watch. They could continue as they wanted.

There were, however, other things he was good at doing. "There is something I could do for you here." Blues' head was tilted again, as though listening or thinking. "I haven't had the opportunity to…check them over," or even scan them, "but if what you said is true, then it will be best if you let me look over the robots here." Help them be good little robots. "I'm certain that their current capabilities leave much to be desired." He was certain that the poor things were stupid as they were now. Even though, honestly, he'd still do it even if X said no. He couldn't leave them like that. It grated against him, would bother him every time he encountered one. It was a programmed compulsion, not something he was meant to resist or hold back from.

X smiled, then nodded. "Rocinolle will be happy to have some help with the mechaniloids. Goodness knows we need it. She may be one of our best techs, but…Neo Arcadia left much to be desired in terms of actual skills application for the Reploids there." Neo Arcadia left a lot to be desired in far too many areas, were X to be completely honest with himself. "Would you like me to walk with you, or should I just let her know that you'll stop by once you're settled in?"

Blues stood up and straightened his scarf. Without the trench coat, his clothing was even more obviously dated. The Robot Master didn't seem to notice, or perhaps he just didn't care. X may claim that 'Rocinolle' was one of their best techs, but if the skill of everyone else he'd encountered was any indication…

Not that it was their fault. They'd had no guidance, nothing to look back on. Only something they partially understood, something whose theory they barely grasped, and had to move forward from there. At the very least, he expected to have to convert their coding to something that wasn't so…to something that was written to work with the way they needed to be used. "We can go now."

"Alright," X said, heading for the door and waiting for it to open before he stepped out into the hallway, waiting for Blues to secure his quarters. "Rocinolle's on the level right above us, so I'll head up while you're waiting for the lift. That okay?"

"That's fine." The door slid closed behind Blues, the locks clicking softly in place. It'd be interesting, he thought, if one of the security team tried to crack what he'd used to override their controls on his door. It'd give him an idea of how they approached problems. If one of the others encountered the lock, they'd see it for what it was: an invitation, a game. A challenge. The Reploids might not recognize that, though.

X nodded again. "Alright, I'll see you when you get upstairs." Pressing his hand against one of the nearby communication terminals, the wireless access points that allowed the six levels of the Resistance base the ability to communicate wirelessly underground, his data rushed into the system, moving through the network as he looked for the exit point on the fifth level.

Wow. The network was literally humming with activity, active from so many different points, and X hadn't seen it get like this since he and Ciel had first started discussing their plans to find Zero with the rest of the Resistance.

It couldn't really be helped, X thought. There had been a lot of concern about this latest mission, and for them to return with not one, but _two_ units from Neo Arcadia? There was a note of sadness to the communications bounding around him at the loss of seven others, but it had been getting harder and harder to evade the Pantheon and Golem patrols, so this kind of reaction to their efforts should have been expected.

Several of the signals thrummed against X, each one the wireless signal from a different Reploid. There were those that were on the network, but quiet, such as Cerveau and Doigt, as well as the surveillance crew, but it was easy for the Resistance members not occupied with their duties to notice that X was on the network. And, of course, they saw that as an open invitation to bombard him with messages, short queries, most of which he sent back to their origin points with a brief note letting them know he'd talk more later, after things had started to settle down and they had made sure that Neo Arcadia wasn't going to attempt a retaliatory attack.

X found his exit point, quickly darting for it and reforming on the fifth level just in time to see the lift headed downwards. At least that meant that Blues wouldn't be much…

X's eyes shot wide. So many signals, so many voices on the network, so many impatient touches against his energy, his essence, by those that wanted information. Blues' warning came screaming to the forefront of his thoughts, of what Robot Masters were capable of and how entirely defenseless X was when he was uploaded to a network. Even on a server he trusted, with people he counted as comrades, as friends…

He could only stare into space as the realization sank in.


	5. Remembered Pain

_ One of the aspects we wanted to touch upon in this story is X's mental state, and what all those years of warfare did to him. He's way too nice in the games, honestly, and he's not quite so calm and collected here. It's very sad that he's so run down, but since he's so present here in this story, we needed to really emphasize that. He is old, and he is tired, and now to have this dropped on his lap? We're sorry, X, because it gets worse before it begins to even consider getting better._

_ People have been asking about Rock. That will be addressed a bit later into the story. Until then, Blues has to figure out how to connect with others on his own. No, Blues, we are not sorry for that. _

_ So here X has his revelation ( the first of many), Blues finds a probable niche for himself in the base, and the two units begin to learn about one another._

* * *

><p>It took a minute for the lift to arrive and deliver Blues to the fifth level. Each level was large and sprawling, and without having the layouts on file, he'd probably have gotten lost. He didn't pass anyone in the hall this time, so he was spared any odd glances at his clothing.<p>

It didn't take him long to find X, though the android's condition was a bit unexpected. X was floating calmly in the hall, but he was staring blankly at the wall, looking as though he wasn't even seeing what was right in front of him. Looking as though his processor had just been given something it wasn't quite certain what to do with. He stopped several feet from X and just watched him, frowning slightly.

For Reploids, the network was a secondary level of existence, a way for them to communicate without being in the same room. It was a meeting place for them, an area where their signals could move freely across the globe back in the day when there was more than one city still alive on the wasteland of the planet.

To a Robot Master, the network wasn't someplace they entered, somewhere they went to hang out and shoot the breeze with units halfway across the planet.

To a Robot Master, the network was something they controlled, managed, from a far more omnipresent point of view.

The network wasn't somewhere their mind could interface with. Their minds, their power, their control as _true_ network and unit managers…

A Robot Master on a network _was_ the network: data transfers, programming authorization, access controllers. Were it not for Blues being the one managing the network in Neo Arcadia when X had uploaded…

X shuddered at what that would have meant had Neo Arcadia been under the control of a different Robot Master…if there had been someone managing the network that _wasn't_ his father's creation.

He whimpered at the thought, at the sudden feeling of his absolute vulnerability, one hand snapping up to cover his mouth.

Blues waited several more moments after X covered his mouth, but when the unit didn't make any further movements, Blues began to become concerned. He scanned X, and the elf's systems returned that he was fine. No damage, no injuries. He'd have pinged X normally, but he wasn't on the network when he was manifested this way, so instead, "X."

X's head snapped to the side, the Cyber Elf's form flickering slightly in shock, his own flight response nearly drawing him back into Cyberspace because of the defense triggers that had just been set off. Closing his eyes, he forced himself to calm, to collect himself. He was in no danger here, not while he was off the network, but when he finally looked at Blues again, there was _fear_ in those eidolic malachite eyes.

Blues frowned again, scanned X again, just in case, but again, the elf's systems returned that he was alright. He saw how X flinched, how he almost bolted, and he saw the fear in the Cyber Elf's eyes. That was… "_X_." Blues' voice was more forceful this time, but he spoke more slowly. "What happened?"

There was something immensely odd in the fact that X couldn't cry in this form, no matter how much he needed to, how much he wanted to. His body flickered again, as if he couldn't keep himself focused, and X opted for the only thing he could think of. As the first soft whimper escaped him, he focused his energy enough that he wouldn't just walk right through Blues before float-running into his eldest brother, pressing himself close and resting his head against Blues' shoulder. "I'm…I'm sorry I didn't listen before, Blues, didn't get what you were trying to tell me. I'm…I'm…" He whimpered again, wished for a moment that he could cry because this, _all of this_, felt so entirely unnatural to him, for him. "The others on the network here…they messaged me, tried to talk to me while I switched floors, and…there were so many." X closed his eyes, pressing his ethereal body as close as he could to Blues, praying the static-like electric current most felt when X neared them didn't make his brother uncomfortable.

Ah, that. "It's…for the best that you understand it now rather than when you're…under attack." Blues was trying to figure out what he was supposed to do with X. He knew that there should be some sort of comforting happening. It wasn't as though Blues had never been hugged before (Rock did most of it, although, in those early days…), but he was…this wasn't how he was used to communicating, wasn't how he was used to delivering reassurance. Tentatively, he put an arm around X's shoulders, though he didn't put much weight on it: he wasn't sure exactly how solid X was.

Oh. X couldn't share minds, couldn't empathize, couldn't feel other people that way, and without his body, he couldn't do much physically either. That must be painful. And here, he was the highest, the one in charge, the oldest (aside from Blues). The one everyone else turned to. It would have been lonely, spending so much time alone at the top.

"I hadn't…intended to frighten you with the idea that way. Forgive me." Perhaps if he'd been clearer, X would have understood up front. "They cannot harm you that way. I don't think it's ever occurred to any of them. Would you like me to prioritize the composition of that augmented defensive program?" So X could feel secure again?

X shook his head. "I'm fine on this network…on our networks. We're secured against Neo Arcadia unless they have a really skilled hacker," which X figured they didn't, what with the condition the city was in. That didn't mean he should upload like that too often, though. "Besides, I can stay off the network if need be. It's not…not that hard to get around. I…I just don't like doing it." It was odd to randomly pass through things in the base, especially when the Reploids weren't expecting it.

Taking a deep breath, X pushed softly against Blues, indicating that the elder could let go. "I'm…I'm sorry. For being as old as I am, I shouldn't be" so weak "so easily frightened. And it's not the Reploids here that I'm afraid of. I'm an android, so I know what they're capable of on the network. It was just…there were at least thirty signals that hit me all at once, and when I realized that…had they been Robot Masters like you, that I wouldn't have been so lucky if it were a different robot that had accessed the network, if it hadn't been _you_."

Blues frowned at X again. "That's why you need it. I will have the program ready in…four hours, no fewer. It'd take less time, but I can't use my own coding as a base. I'll have to write it all out." And he'd be looking at the mechaniloids up here, gathering intel, and monitoring the base and Rock at the same time. "And realizing your weak points isn't something to be ashamed of. Being afraid isn't something to feel shame over. Especially when the danger is very real. So don't be sorry." Blues slipped his arm off X then, but not before. He wanted X to understand that. "Doctor Light never…predicted this set of circumstances. But I _am_ here. We will fix it."

It reminded Blues slightly of Rock, of when Rock became unsure, of how it was like he was lost in the dark. Rock wasn't so elevated as X was in this society, but he was a hero, a household name, and there were certainly days when Rock honestly wondered whether what he was doing was really helping the situation. If his efforts weren't futile. Rock had his family close at hand, though, a solid base of support. Did X have a similar structure? Or was he isolated here?

"Would…would you need my coding? Would that help? I know I said that we only ever made sense of a small bit of it, but…" X looked down, somewhat ashamed, but thankful that so far, no one had come down the hallway they were in.

X sighed, frustrated, not having missed that he'd actually pushed himself partway through Blues' arm when he'd tried to pull away. "And I'm not supposed to _be_ weak, not supposed to break. The Resistance _needs_ me, and I'm…I'm…" He looked at Blues. "How can I _not_ be ashamed? I'm two centuries old, Blues, and I've seen so much brought to ruin before me. I can't _afford_ to be weak. Not now. Not with…not with what we're trying to do, not when I'm leading the effort to reclaim Neo Arcadia."

Dropping his head into one hand, X forced himself to center, to focus. "I'll leave you to go talk to Rocinolle. I…" He stopped, unable to face his brother now. He wanted to talk, wanted to know where Blues had come from, where he'd been. He wanted Blues to talk to him, to spend time with him, make him feel as if his only surviving family member actually wanted to be around him. All that remained of his past, of his surrogate family, was now contained to a charger pod, once more stricken by amnesia, no longer remembered who he was or how much he'd meant to the last of Light's creations.

Was wanting his real family to be there for him now too much to ask?

"Let's go back downstairs." This matter was far more pressing than the mechaniloids in the base. Blues knew that X would try asking more questions he wasn't willing to answer, but there had to be something he could do. And if X needed to talk, this was the least he could do.

In all honesty, this was worrying him. It wasn't that Blues was bothered that X wanted to confide in him. Not at all: they were from the same line. But…X sounded like he hadn't had a chance to say things like this for a long, _long_ time. In his position, with nowhere to turn…

He didn't want to be right about that assumption.

And he was beginning to think that the rest of this conversation was best resumed behind closed doors. "I can see to the mechaniloids later," he added when X didn't move right away.

X was honestly torn. Would it be right to talk to Blues, to drag him away from work that the Resistance could, _would_ benefit from, for them to sit down and _talk_? "Blues…I can't…I can't keep you from work that will help us. We need all the hands we can get, all the help…and I…it can wait." Shaking his head, X fought back the urge to start whining into Blues' shoulder again. What was it about today, about being around Zero and Blues that make him feel like a newbuilt?

Blues didn't respond right away. He frowned at X again, but after a few moments, one of the mechaniloids crawled over to Blues. It was a smaller model, sort of arachnid in appearance, and its many legs made a soft tapping sound on the floor. Blues knelt down and gently gathered it into his arms. He straightened and turned to X again, staring at him from behind the shades. "You're looking after this Resistance, X, but who's looking after _you_? I'll work on this little one and your program, but we're going downstairs." The way he said it wasn't a request. He wasn't asking whether X wanted to go, wasn't asking whether X felt like X had the right to go. He was telling X.

X smiled softly at the Hoppider unit, though it was a smile that hid a greater pain. "I've been looking after myself, Blues. Who else would, when I'm the oldest still alive? Who else, when everyone that I held as important had died and been forgotten?" Sighing, he followed Blues, opting to just follow him instead of interfacing with the network again.

The unit was trilling softly, almost purring in Blues' arms as they headed back to the elevator. "I never understood that about humanity, and you seem to have picked up that mindset. What does age have to do with it? Why should you have to stand alone just because you're the oldest? Why are you the only one that has to shoulder that burden?" Who told X that that was acceptable?

And so, he was the only family X had even known, and Zero was one of his oldest friends, yet his memory was wiped.

"The ones here are young, yes, and they do need guidance, yes, but they have voices, too. They should be using them, not letting you shoulder everything." That they'd allowed X to deal with everything was unacceptable. With a whirr, the elevator began its descent.

"Age is supposed to grant wisdom, to grant insight. It's the difference between you and me, between myself and any of Neo Arcadia's newbuilts," X snorted at the thought that crossed his mind, "the same as it is between me and Zero now." That realization, that comparison, stung so deeply.

"Age doesn't grant wisdom. Experience does. And I'm not saying to grant them the same…access level you have." Because that could be disastrous. "But if you're hurting, there's something wrong, the same way there's something wrong if they're hurting." Pain was a symptom, not something to be lived with. Not that he was taking his own advice. Well, there was something wrong, but there was nothing to be done about it in his case. Nothing he was willing to have done, at any rate.

Blues hadn't stayed long enough to hear Cerveau's assessment of Zero, so he didn't have a comment to offer on that. Instead, he shifted the Hoppider to let it rest against his chest so he could support it with one arm. He was treating it a bit like a human might a puppy. Like something small and cuddly and affectionate.

"You'd think I'd have enough of both," X said. "Nine wars, countless smaller uprisings, building Neo Arcadia, watching as the Elf Wars nearly annihilated both our races, sacrificing my…" X froze. Was that something he really needed to bring up? He honestly hoped Blues could wait until they were back in his room.

Blues stopped in time with X when he froze, but he was frowning again. "Sacrificed your what?"

X was thankful that the lift had finished its descent just then, silent as he moved for Blues' room. This wasn't something that he wanted to discuss in public. Even if there weren't microphones lining the halls of the facility as there were now in Neo Arcadia, this wasn't a matter to be brought up along a public causeway.

Blues didn't pursue the issue, quickly understanding X's intent. As they neared the door, the lock could be heard clicking and the door slid open for them. Blues stepped into the center of the room and gently placed the Hoppider unit on the floor. It skittered a little bit, but then held still as though a verbal command had been issued. Once X floated inside, the door shut and locked behind him. Blues was looking down at the unit, frowning at it, and it began walking around. Its normal walking motions were slightly jerky, still a bit inefficient. He had it climb up a wall, then turned toward X. "This has to do with your body, doesn't it? What happened to it?"

X nodded, silent at first. "I…honestly didn't want to bring this up, not until…not until you'd gotten to know Zero better, to know why I trust him so completely despite his origins." He closed his eyes, dropping to the floor with a heavy sigh, resting his back against the wall without passing through it. "We found Zero a few years after we'd started mass-producing Reploids. When…when the first unit went to retrieve him, when he realized that there was _another_ android out there, we…we didn't expect the carnage that followed. There had been no mercy for the units that had invaded his territory. Not even the nurses we sent survived. Then Sigma offered to handle him, bring him in, despite the risks. They found and…somewhere along the line, Zero inadvertently transferred the virus from himself to Sigma. It wasn't a complete transfer, but it was enough to start Sigma down the road he followed.

"Sigma…he used the virus to try and turn Zero. Several times over. Even…even seething with the virus, so deeply and completely infected that he should have been insane, Zero remained on _our_ side, tore down the very same forces that the virus had made. Never once did he even think of changing sides. It…it took time before we realized that instead of trying to build an anti-virus from Sigma's data, we could build it from our true Case Zero." X's voice began to break. "Zero…was never much one for the medical wing or the labs. He hated them like any human child forced to the doctor's office for routine checkups, but…but he offered himself up to the best researchers of the time, let them rip his very essence from him and toss it into a body that was only meant to house him until the procedures to develop an anti-virus had tested positive on his original body.

"Ciel's great-grandmother was the one who created the first of the Cyber Elves, the one that created the anti-virus from Zero. Mother Elf was…the greatest blessing we could have hoped for. She actually managed to cure the virus, and though it took far more than her presence to restore the Reploids," X smiled softly, "she ended the Maverick Wars. Zero's _daughter_ ended the wars that had plagued our world, cleaned the Maverick Virus from the atmosphere, stopped the spread of the infection. We couldn't have been happier with the results. Then…" Weil, the bastard, "someone stole her, stole Zero's body, and started a new age of terror by fusing Zero's original body with the corrupted Dark Elf. Zero was forced out of stasis in a body he didn't even know how to use in order to fight alongside the rest of the Maverick Hunters.

"One by one, we had to watch Reploids driven insane by the Cyber Elves under Dark Elf's control, watch our comrades, our friends, our families, destroyed as though Omega thought our lives his playthings. All Zero sacrificed, and Doctor Weil used that to control us, to subdue us, to make us mindless pawns because he didn't see us fit enough to even crawl in the dirt because we weren't _people_ in his eyes." X shoved the palms of his hands against his eyes, fighting tears that would never come.

"We…Zero and I, we defeated Omega, defeated Weil, but we lost the Dark Elf in the process, and Zero committed himself back into the hands of scientists to be resealed, carrying the guilt that should have been laid upon Omega for the bloodshed of the Elf Wars. We'd also lost most of the planet and nearly every living creature on it. It was why I used the remaining resources from the Maverick Hunters to build a city around the ruins of one of the orbital elevators. I thought that we could fix the world, protect what was left of it as we reclaimed the world outside its walls. Then, only a handful of years ago, one of our scout crews reported back that they'd found and captured Dark Elf, but…she…they couldn't contain her."

X looked up, eyes blankly staring at the ceiling. "After everything that I'd been through, all the wars, all the pain and suffering and loss, after everyone that mattered to me were either dead or lost to history," since no one had let him know where Zero had been moved to, "I just wanted to give up. I wanted to step away from everything the world made me shoulder.

"So I used my body as the final seal over Dark Elf's prison, used the body Doctor Light made for me to cage the savior turned destroyer of our people." X's voice was thick with frustration by now. "But I just seem to be far too stubborn to die, and now I let the Resistance raise me back up onto the same pedestal that I tried to kill myself to escape." He finally fell silent, unable to continue as he wrapped his arms around his legs, drawing himself into as small a presence as he could without actually leaving the room.

Behind the shades, Blues' eyes had softened. He'd listened to every word, registered every turn of emotion in X's voice. The Hoppider was wandering along the wall now, apparently directionless. And so here X was, curled into the fetal position in his eldest brother's room. Blues was willing to bet that there was no one else in this base that had heard that story told by X. Zero would likely become the second, should his memories not recover. Slowly, Blues sat down across from X, folding his legs Indian-style as the Hoppider crawled onto his lap like an eager puppy. He put a hand on its back. That virus the insane Wily included with Zero effectively wiped out everyone X had ever grown close to, everyone he'd ever befriended, except Zero. For _centuries_. Now he was alone here, or had been until Blues and Zero had been brought back.

X didn't even have a _support unit_. Androids couldn't make use of them. And the people in this base knew X as a legendary hero, as a legendary ruler. They weren't willing, or perhaps weren't able, to allow themselves to get close to him. How long had he continued this way?

It was like he was looking at what Rock may have become had he not had people tempering him, had he not had support.

So X's body was being used as a seal on the 'Dark Elf', which was Zero's daughter after being corrupted and, by the sound of it, reprogrammed, before being used as a weapon against the world.

And none of them had been able to be there for him. None of them had been allowed to be there for him. They hadn't been allowed to continue, hadn't been allowed to help this struggling world. And now his youngest brother was broken. Broken in body, broken in heart. He'd had no one to look after him. And he thought he was weak for wanting an out?

But he couldn't explain to X why he couldn't fully trust Zero, couldn't explain why he was in Neo Arcadia. Not while everything was so…it was too dangerous. Too dangerous for all of them.

"I am sorry. We couldn't be there for you." Even though they wanted to be. Even though they should have been. They hadn't been able to hold it together, hadn't been able to stave it off. "None of that is…what anyone would have wanted for you." The idea had been to let him live his own life so he could be happy, not so he could give so much of himself away that there was _nothing left_.

"You shouldn't be sorry," X responded, though he hadn't moved from his position on the floor. "It's not your fault. Whatever happened between my sealing and being awakened, it wasn't your fault. And no one could have known, could have stopped, what Zero carried. Not unless Wily had decided not to use him as a weapon or if someone else had been aware, been able to…to destroy him, to destroy the virus." He sighed again. "I'm sorry, Blues. I…I shouldn't be weighing you down with all my problems. They're _my_ problems to deal with, my decisions that I have to face, the things I have to be responsible enough to accept."

Blues shook his head. "As I said, you should not quietly shoulder everything," not if it was ripping him up this way. "You seem to feel that…wanting an out made you weak somehow. That wanting an escape should be something you're ashamed of. You lasted far longer than most would." And X wasn't built to manage the way the Robot Masters were. He was built to be more humanlike than anything prior. Doctor Light believed that if the android were more humanlike, humanity would be able to accept him.

Blues didn't understand why telling him about his concerns would mean that X wasn't accepting his responsibilities. He wondered if the android had some sort of logic glitch, except his system should have cleaned that out immediately.

Besides, Blues could use the context. It was data that was pertinent to the situation at hand.

"I'm supposed to be this…icon of hope for humanity, for Reploids. What does it say when your hope, _your hero_, tried to commit suicide?" Not that X didn't have personal experience with that, seeing as Zero had been his teacher and commander for a good number of years and had gotten himself retired _twice_.

"It says that you're a person, the same as anyone else. It says that you need to be looked after, the same as anyone else. To me, it says that you _haven't _been looked after," that he'd been neglected. Terribly neglected. It grated against portions of Blues' core programming, though not the same way it did when he saw poor little mechaniloids hobbling clumsily about.

"Why do you see it as so important that I be looked after as if I can't take care of myself?" X knew just how hypocritical that sounded. "I'm not like the rest of them, Blues. Everyone needs a hero, a guide, someone that they can turn to and trust. Who would I have been back then, or even now, if I just told the world to shove off?"

Blues paused at that, frowning slightly again. "Forgive me, I forgot that…those words mean something different to Robot Masters." Forgot that X wasn't used to the way he thought. "It's not as though I think that you are…incapable of being independent. To us…" Ugh, he hated trying to explain this. Rock had always been better at it. Blues hesitated again, as though he wasn't quite sure how to put it to words. "Humans, Robot Masters, and androids—Reploids—are all socially dependent. So for an individual unit to try to take on the responsibility of a community without…" Blues hesitated again, vetoing the first three phrases that came to mind, "…without a supportive base, is…" is neglectful of the community. "It's supposed to be give-and-take, not give-give-give." Blues had been offering to give rather than take from X.

He'd begun clutching the spider a bit tightly as he spoke, as though that would root him, help him figure out how to say it without offending X further.

"But I _had_ social groups. I had Doctor Cain and the rest of the crew that found me, that helped us develop Reploids. I had Commander Signas, and Alia, and Axl, Palette, Douglas, Zero…" X's voice shattered a bit at the last name. "I had a huge support net during the Maverick Wars. When things…when things went south after the Elf Wars, I managed for a few years along before…before I talked to the analysts that had been working on Zero. I let them see my code, try to see if any more could be figured out, and used what they could decipher to build the four Guardians, to build my children." Even now, even here, he had people around him. "I don't get how surrounding myself with others, even if they do set me up as someone greater than them, how that means I've been without a support base, been me giving without having anyone return the favor." He sighed, finally looking up. "Am I missing something here?"

The Robot Master was clearly struggling with his feelings, with the words. And probably cursing X's inability to link empathetically with him. "It's not…you can be alone in a crowded room. From your…account, Zero was your main support base." And Zero had been absent for a long time, and now? "There are people here, yes, but…they're _taking_, not _giving_." Blues didn't know how else to say it. "It has to be…" Blues shook his head. "If they were giving, you wouldn't…" wouldn't be this broken, wouldn't be this _sad_. "There is emotional damage when a close member of your…supportive base…is lost." Be it death or another cause. "It's a collective damage. Humans don't…really recover from it. Robot Masters do not recover from it. I…doubt your kind does much better." Heartbreak. Betrayal, loss. It added up.

As Blues spoke, he seemed to get…not quite upset, but his voice began straining, as though they were dancing around an issue personal to _him_. "Even if you had a supportive base then, it was lost, then replaced. Then lost. Then replaced. Rapidly, right?" The Robot Master had to pause again, though it was hard to tell if it was because he was straining for words or struggling with something else. "None of the ones I saw here are close to you, not the way…not the way family should be. Zero and I are the only two you regard as such." And they arrived _today_. Blues was looking down and away, clutching at the mechaniloid. His sunglasses were as impenetrable as ever. As time went on, as damage accumulated, it got harder to trust, harder to open up, didn't it? Harder to believe that you wouldn't be hurt, harder to believe that the person wouldn't be torn from you.

"I…part of me doesn't want to see them in that kind of light, let them be that close anymore, because when I do, when I let them close, when I let them in, it hurts all the more when someone decides they're more useful dead than alive," X's eyes had narrowed, his thoughts turning to the doppelganger currently lording over _his _city because even X couldn't figure out what to do to fix the energy crisis. Ciel's invention was priority for them, though saving Reploids from unjust retirements was up there for all the units that weren't contained to the base.

Blues seemed to welcome the change of focus in conversation and he turned the mechaniloid over, looking for its access panel. He popped it open and began looking over its components before speaking again. "That is what I meant." None of them were close. They weren't taking and not giving because they were jerks. Well, not necessarily jerks. They weren't in the position to give. That's why Blues wanted to give, if he could. Except he'd offended X instead. He pulled his gloves off, unbuttoning each one carefully and setting them aside. "I…did not mean to criticize you." Even if it sounded that way.

Some of the Hoppider's components were a bit loose, he saw. He wanted to make sure it was physically fit before touching its programming. He knew that would need to be massively rewritten, but he couldn't test its movements if its body wasn't up to par. He rolled up his right sleeve to above his elbow, folding the cloth neatly so it wouldn't fall back down.

"We think in terms of maintenance, in terms of taking care of others. That is a major facet of our core programming, of our 'instinct set'." So please don't be offended when I speak in those terms. His right forearm morphed into some sort of composite tool for lab work and he began to poke around inside of the mechaniloid, undoing some things and tightening others. "Ideally, there would be different ones tasked to this," basic maintenance, "but I need to be sure its body is properly functioning before I go over its programming." Or all of the beta testing would be a waste.

"It's…it's alright," X said finally. "I could tell from your tone earlier that I upset you, and I really wasn't trying to do that. It's just…since…since Zero's second sealing…I didn't want anyone close to me. It…I was _tired_ of hurting all the time. Even the Guardians were really only there to ease up some of the burdens placed on me because I'd suddenly become the head of a bureaucracy and had next to no idea how to handle everything that landed on my plate. They…those in the city grew to see me as someone they looked up to, someone whose word was law because, the way that people in the city are, the way they fear that one more upset will wipe us off the face of this planet completely, my word _had_ to be law."

X sighed again. "I'm sorry, Blues. I really am. I mean…psychologically, I can understand why I needed people on my level, people that could relate to me, that I could relate to in return. Realistically? I'm tired of hurting because of the social construct I'm supposed to believe in, this idea that I don't have to stand alone in the middle of the crowd."

X had to see that forcing himself to be alone, crowd or no, was more damaging than trusting.

He could understand what X was saying. He understood being tired of pain, being tired of _still being alive_. He hadn't been grateful at all to Wily for rigging him with this power source, hadn't been grateful for being given an extension on his existence.

And then he met Rock.

So Blues merely nodded, stilling fiddling with the mechaniloid. It was being very good so far. It was well-maintained, but his programming set tended to make him a perfectionist.

"I believe I told you earlier: trust isn't something that should be given away freely." So Blues understood where X was coming from, he really did. Even if X didn't think so.

"So," X said, realizing just how much of what Blues had been saying sounded like it had been from experience, had been from his own damaging moments, his own losses, "I know that you only just met me, only just started talking to me, but…" X looked for a moment at the bundle on Blues' bed, "why were you leaving Neo Arcadia? I know the situation there leaves a lot to be desired for those of a mechanical nature…" He honestly couldn't figure out how to continue.

Blues froze in his ministrations over the mechaniloid. "I could not abide by the ways of the city." There was a sort of shrug in his voice. A dismissal. He didn't want to talk about it.

X snorted. "Well, you're in good company then. Most of the people you've seen around here were actually rescued from the city after they'd been falsely labeled Maverick."

"I take it they are using the fear behind that word to cow people into submission." Like being branded with leprosy in human villages. "I noticed that the people here are…nearly all Reploid." Ciel was the only human he'd encountered thus far.

"Ciel's one of only three humans that are aware of this base. At present…" X sighed. "At present, Copy X is following a glitchy directive that basically mandates that the human population of Neo Arcadia is the city's primary concern. Somewhere along the line, he figured that systematically removing Reploids that acted out of line with their assigned jobs or tried to interact with humans, especially in light of the…ah…" If X could have blushed, he probably would have done so now, "unique way that human-Reploid relations evolved, ensured that our kind didn't interfere with the ability for the populace to recover from the Elf Wars. Now, though, there's talk that he's taken to retiring any unit that so much as tries to develop a human-grade personality." Which was really hard _not_ to do for their species, seeing as they were physically and mentally designed to be as close to human as possible. And base programming _included_ a human-grade personality.

Blues paused in his work again. "He…has a directive that puts human safety over all others?" Someone tried to put the First Law into a Reploid? And by what he'd seen of the programmers here…even Doctor Light took several tries to…

The memory almost made him _sick._

He almost didn't catch the second part of X's explanation, along with not-X's name: Copy X. Human-Reploid relations that would…impact human repopulation rates? He understood the implication immediately, but he didn't…no, he wasn't going to try to work it out again. He tried to convince his system that some things would not make sense to him and that was okay.

And this nice little Hoppider made a lot of sense, so let's think about that.

"It wasn't meant to do that. He…he was programmed to ensure that they were protected within Neo Arcadia, provided for, since they are technically as much a part of our world as Reploids are. Between the Maverick and Elf Wars, the human population is only at about fifteen to twenty percent of where it was when I was first activated. The human race suffered a great deal because of our wars and…Copy X is simply trying to help, but he's not addressing the real problems, the issues that are going to bring Neo Arcadia to ruin. It's why Ciel founded the Resistance, because she's are trying to save those who get caught in the cross hairs of programming that's not working right and addressing the city's power shortage. Once we can offer the city a solution, once we can start working on fixing the planet again, then we can turn our attention to trying to break whatever it is on Mother Elf that turned her evil. At least then I can get my body back and get the city back to where it was before I left."

Blues really didn't like copies. The Dark Men and Sniper Joes were copies of him; Copy Rock was a copy of Rock. And now they'd copied X? He'd dealt with the Dark Men and Copy Rock—it was necessary to the rest of their survival—but now this copy of X was…and the city thought that was X? The Copy's city was run down and impoverished. It was amazing how quickly the streets dissolved into chaos just from the lights going out.

"I looked into the city's amenities while I was on the network. The power grid is wasteful. There is a lot of excess energy just…being wasted away." And that was only one thing. "There is an energy shortage, but they're not rationing it at all." Not in any sane or efficient way.

"It's not just a shortage. There's been a bevy of issues with the geothermal power plant in the last decade. For whatever reason, the output from there has been dropping over the past few years, but nothing is wrong with the systems. They're still working at peak capacity, and there's been no problem with tectonic activity that would have affected that aspect of the system, so it's completely over our heads. That's why Ciel's been working on studying the relationship between normal Cyber Elves and their ability to process Energen Crystals. Most current-gen Reploids can consume them for energy as well, and a crystal the size of a typical engagement ring diamond would be able to power the city for weeks, if not longer. It's just a matter of figuring out the how in terms of harnessing that energy. For now, though, we've managed well enough here at the base with solar. Nothing _but_ sun as far as they eye can see during the day."

Blues had been mildly surprised by some of the things that X brought up, but hadn't been made upset or angry during the course of their conversation. At least, not until that last bit. "…This base runs on _solar energy_?"

"Yes. It's been like that for the last three and a half years, once she got the materials for the solar cells together. Why?"

Unbelievable. Absolutely unbelievable. The technology was available and that copy _still_ ordered Rock's death? When it would benefit _absolutely no one_? He'd looked at both of them and ordered Rock scrapped. Needlessly. "Why _isn't_ Neo Arcadia using solar power?" Blues was gripping the Hoppider so tightly now that it made a little cheeping noise and he startled and relaxed his grip on it.

And those 'Guardians' there in the room knew this, knew that the research would be redundant, but they still stood back and let the copy do that? They'd watched even as those researchers protested, with cold eyes and straight faces, as an innocent child was _ordered to death_?

"Aside from the fact that we only really starting using solar power here a few years ago, there's the fact that there is a lethal force order against any Reploid who has left the city without being under direct orders to do so. For us to give them the tech, to advise them that it can be used to great effect for the city, to try and push for the city to use it, would require so many deaths. And that doesn't even touch on the fact that Copy X isn't exactly the rational, listening type."

It was good that Blues was capable of several simultaneous trains of thought. The processor that had been dealing with X was now all rage and static and he had to switch the train of thought over to even register that X was still talking, let alone what he was saying. He needed this information to build up a view of this world; he needed to understand what was going on in this world. Even though every new thing he discovered was…

Even though every new thing he found out just made it more twisted and misshapen.

"You seem…shocked that solar energy is being used at all," X noted, seeing that Blues' grip on the Hoppider kept changing intensity, as if his brother was fighting so hard against things that he didn't want to talk about that it was affecting his actions.

Blues _was_ shocked. Perhaps his problem was that he was assuming that the androids, that the Reploids, were mentally more in line with what he was than with humanity. They'd been built to integrate into human society; of course they would be more…of course their cruelty would mirror that. Even if Copy X was a very extreme example, a very extreme brand of cruelty. It took him a few moments to formulate a response to X. "I'd…not seen it in use at all in the city. I'd assumed the technology was lost." Assumed it was because he'd been led to believe it was.

"Solar power is rarely used at this point since we had the geothermal plants built, more so because Neo Arcadia is the only city left and even she's contained under a climate-controlled biodome. The farming colonies that we have floating in the lower part of the stratosphere use it, but their systems have secondary modes that operate on hydrogen fuel cells and wind turbines built into the underbelly of the colony as safety measures. It's…without exposing the human populace to a million natural threats, there's very limited resources available to the city. That's why Ciel's been trying to develop a self-contained energy source, something that can run from within the city. Combine what she's doing with the geothermal plant, as well as get more units in there to see what has been going wrong, and it should fix the problem in short order."

That didn't even address the fact that none of the Reploids were solar powered. What about the units that worked in exposed environments? Did they rely on 'Energen Crystals' as well? Wouldn't it be far more efficient if the sun's energy charged them as well? For that matter…the efficiency of geothermal energy was only in the neighborhood of ten to twenty percent.

"So you've restricted your energy options in a bid to preserve the remaining human population," Blues summarized, though he didn't sound disapproving of looking out for humanity. "And even when she does engineer a solution to the energy plant production problem, the issue of getting Neo Arcadia to even take it is perhaps a larger hurdle." Due to how volatile relations were.

"Once she's got the system figured out, once we know that it will work on a large scale, I intend to return to Neo Arcadia and take my city back," X said, a hint of pride in his voice at the mention of it being _his_ city. "It's part of why we needed a battle unit of Zero's capabilities. I need a sword and shield since I cannot fight in this form, and no Reploid from today's world can match Zero, not even my Guardians."

Blues nodded thoughtfully. "When it comes to that, you'll have an easier time with the system taken offline again." Grabbing the city's network and essentially holding its hands behind its back for the coup. They wouldn't be able to respond to it properly: there had been a great deal that Blues hadn't done that he could have during his escape from the city, a great deal that hadn't been necessary due to the security being so lax. They'd step it up now that they knew that something could happen, but really, what could they do against him? Absolutely nothing.

"Mmm," X murmured in assent. "If you'd be willing to do that for me, it would be most appreciated." X looked thoughtfully at his brother for a moment. "Your job, the work you do: it involves program coding, right?"

"As a Robot Master? Yes, that is a major facet of it." Though some units were more focused on it than others.

"I…I may need your help more so then," X admitted, "in order to reclaim and redeem Zero's daughter, to get my body back." X silently hoped that Blues would be so willing, would let go of what he knew of Wily in order to help Zero, to help another android reclaim his family.

Blues was silent for a moment, considering. "I'll need to take a look at Zero's coding as well, then." He wanted to see how it was that Zero was ignoring the directives to kill that Wily undoubtedly put in. If Zero had done all that he had, if he'd truly turned from the path Wily prescribed him…

Well, he wouldn't be the first of Wily's creations to act independently of his programming.

"I doubt he'd have a problem with that," even with the state of his memories, "especially once he either remembers or is reminded of who Mother Elf is to him."

And there was that melancholy again, that rush of unease at the fact that all that had been there, all the years with the Hunters, all the years at X's side, had been lost to Zero.

"If his memory files are still intact, only corrupted and not wiped, then he may be able to recover them," Blues pointed out as his arm morphed back into its normal state. He closed the Hoppider's panel, then rolled his sleeve back down. "We—the Robot Masters—have backup protection. Our memory files are protected. It'd be incredibly odd for Doctor Wily to not include some sort of protection for Zero." Blues spoke in the present tense more in reference to himself, but he was partly reassuring himself. He hadn't had a chance to look at Rock yet.

"We," X and Doctor Cain, "may have messed that up at some point during his reconstruction, after Sigma brought him back to base. We ended up having to do a little poking around inside his head," actual physical reconstruction in addition to repairing damaged program data, "because of the blunt force damage to the front of his processor incurred during the fight." He looked to his brother. "Would that have caused a problem, or is it just that Zero and I were androids and built differently than you and the rest of the Robot Masters?"

Blues seemed surprised that they'd even tried rebuilding Zero's mind: Wily's coding style was far more convoluted than Light's. "It…may have, but I would need to look at the lost portions to be certain. I am familiar with how…with how Wily coded things, but if the new coding was…every programmer has a personal style. Doctor Light's looks different from Doctor Wily's. If it didn't streamline well enough in, it could have reduced his efficiency. But until I can see what was damaged and what was repaired, I cannot say."

"Whenever you want to take the time out to look at him, just let me know. I know you've got other matters you want to attend to," since the Hoppider unit was moving a little more naturally than it had before, "and I don't want to seem like I'm trying to prioritize Zero's recovery over everyone else's, even though part of me does _want_ to prioritize him." To reclaim what Ciel's mistake might have lost forever.

"The base of his coding was derivative of yours," though Wily undoubtedly broke it down to the foundations and built it up again. Forte certain had done a number on Doctor Light's lab, too. "So why don't you let me take a look at yours first. Once I finish composing that program for you, I'll be able to look at Zero's." The Hoppider didn't even appear on Blues' schedule, apparently. It crawled from his lap, its movements much more fluid than before, needing fewer steps to get from one place to another. Blues turned his head to watch the little unit as it explored.

"Is there somewhere you'd like me to interface so you can get copies of the data," since X no longer had the ports at the base of his skull, "or is there another way for you to get that information?"

The ports would have been easiest, but without the body… "I'll isolate a portion of the network that manages the base's security. Will you be alright with entering into that?" If it's isolated and secured?

"As long as I have an access point, somewhere to actually link into the net, that's fine." He trusted Blues, knew that there wouldn't be a threat posed to him while he was there, no matter how long it took for his brother to get the data he needed.

"I was…gaining access to the server from this terminal," Blues gestured toward the computer casually, as though he'd said he was checking the weather and not hacking the base's security network. "Are you able to access from there?"

Blues was already online on the network, was watching them. They hadn't noticed the security breach at all. Were they only able to recognize a breach when something they didn't want to happen came to pass? To a Robot Master, he'd have been an elephant in the room.

X stood, moved to the desk, and pressed his hand against the terminal port. "Thank you," he said softly as his data fractured and uploaded to the system, feeling himself almost instantly redirected to the security network. Was Blues already in command here, watching over them all? Hadn't any of the monitors noticed that?

X was immediately shrouded on the network, his presence blocked from detection by the monitors to the point that they didn't even register him logging in. Blues directed him to the isolated portion of the network the moment X came online, setting him down in much the same way he'd done while on the Neo Arcadian network. But this time, rather than directing every movement, Blues was just hanging back, just observing. Blues waited for X to gather himself and settle down, letting the android decide when to begin the data upload to Blues.

X's data shuddered a little at the realization of how blind Reploids were to a Robot Master presence on any network, kept unaware unless the network manager felt it was necessary for them to know they were there. '_Where do you want me to upload the data to? Would your terminal work, or is there somewhere in particular?_'

'_You can upload directly to me when you're online like this._' Didn't X know that? Or did Reploids not do that over networks? Blues prompted X then, leaving an opening for X to accept and choose what to send or to decline. Blues was the network, the network was his, and so he could send and receive files this way. He showed X how to do it so he'd know in the future and there was an underlying patience, and underlying hum of contentment in Blues when he was showing and teaching. Like it was something soothing, never a hassle, never an inconvenience.

'_When I still had my body, when Reploids trade data like this, it's either done across a wired connection running between their primary ports or over local wireless connections in private communication channels. Either way, you don't _feel_ like a Reploid. You don't have a point of origin the same way we do, a signal that I can aim at and link to on the network._' It really did show how much of a gap there was between Robot Masters and androids in terms of their ability to communicate and interface with one another. Isolating his memory files to keep those from transferring, a copy of everything else was sent to the area where Blues had directed him to load it to. '_There, that should work,_' he said. '_Is everything going through okay?_'

'_I have wires that we could have connected with, had you had your body still. Though that may have been even more disorienting for you._' Blues suspected that that would have been a different sort of experience. Although, perhaps not, not if X's mind was still closed as it was. '_Yes, I have it now._' Blues sounded a bit distracted and pleased, as though he was flipping through an interesting book.

'_This…this will help,_' Blues reassured X, though it was still unbelievable to the Robot Master that they hadn't been able to decipher more of X's coding. Would they have been able to make sense of a Robot Master's code, then? Or would that have been equally unintelligible?

'_Do you need me to stay here or can I disconnect from the network?_' X's voice wasn't worried, didn't indicate that he was on edge, but he still didn't want to be on the network any longer than necessary. One panic attack was enough for a while.

'_You can disconnect,_' Blues said, his voice accompanied with a feeling like a nod. He could feel how on edge the android was now that the danger he was in had had time to really sink in. He felt a little bit bad—his intent hadn't been to frighten him—but it was something X needed to be aware of, for his own safety. Not that anyone could hurt him here: saying that this was a secure network did not even begin to describe what this place was.

X reformed once he'd ejected from the terminal, standing near his brother for a moment as he debated whether or not to give the elder his space, let him work. Opting to remain in the room, but keep his distance, especially as…unsure as his brother had seemed earlier when X had first recovered from his experience on the comm network, X moved for the nearby charger, resting in the open pod as his brother continued his work.

The Hoppider trilled again and crawled up and along the wall near X, testing its movement programming. It was already moving much more like a real spider, which may have been unsettling to some humans. But it was much faster now, able to move surprisingly quickly given its weight.

Blues didn't seem to mind that X remained in the room, though the Robot Master was sitting very still as he went over and analyzed the lines of coding that X had given him. It was…Blues wasn't certain whether to be impressed or alarmed that people had taken a little bit and then made up the rest to make up those first Reploids. But this was purely what Doctor Light had written. Blues could tell after scanning it for a few moments: his maker had a very distinct coding style.

Well, this could provide a framework for him to work in, though it looked like Blues would still have to write this all out manually. None of the deciphered code was for X's mental defenses, he quickly noticed, though a great deal was devoted to major systems. It also looked like—yes, that was very similar to what the Robot Masters had, though still completely different. That had to do with reasoning processes, though Doctor Light had to rewrite a lot of it to account for X not needing the Three Laws.

It was hard to not still be bitter.

As Blues moved on, he got to what they hadn't been able to decipher and his progress slowed thirty-three percent. He didn't look back to the deciphered code as a Rosetta Stone. Instead, he took what he knew of Doctor Light's style and what he knew of his own coding and what would need to be different to make X an android and not a Robot Master. There was an underlying order here, decipherable patters, definite flows of logic. If it was only humans working on this, especially humans that weren't educated in this technology, humans that didn't know Doctor Light's work, didn't know how the man thought…

Okay, yes, Blues could see how most of this would have been complete gibberish.

He noticed that X was watching him from the…it looked like a maintenance pod at first, but Blues thought that it was probably the charger pod. "It's like knowing the language, but not the dialect. Or, perhaps more accurately, the spoken language but not the written word." He had references, he understood portions, and the more he had unlocked, the more quickly he could unlock the rest. Knowing five words out of ten led to more understanding than knowing only two.

"I guess it's all a matter of perception, too, of using what you know and going from there." X watched the Hoppider move around the room, shocked at how much more smoothly the unit was moving compared to what Rocinolle was able to do with them in terms of maintenance. "The coders that worked with my data said that it looked like there were layers on top of layers of encryptions that they couldn't figure out, which is why they stopped working when all their efforts kept hitting brick walls.

"He coded all of us that way. My own coding is heavily encrypted, both to protect me," from reprogramming, "and to prevent others from…making cheap knock-offs, irresponsibly replicating the units." There was definite distaste there, as though the thought of copies left a bad taste in his mouth. Of course, to Wily, it'd been one more challenge to rise to. "He didn't want _anyone_ touching you, X. Taking you apart would have gained them no data; he made certain of that." Doctor Light was heartbroken by the way his oldest children were treated by the world, heartbroken by how they were regarded by humanity.

Even if Doctor Light couldn't protect X himself, he'd done everything he could to ensure X's safety, both inside the pod and out. "Your encryptions aren't the same kinds we have, though, so it'll take me a bit longer to break through them. I'll project five hours from now until I have your defensive program ready." And that was him being generous.

It'd go faster if there was more than one Robot Master working on it. He knew Rock would have wanted to help, but in the current situation…no. It was too dangerous.

"Alright. Do you mind if I hang around, or would you prefer it if I go make myself…hover elsewhere?" He was going to say useful, but seeing as he wasn't much more than an embodied data program, the term wouldn't have really applied to the same extent as other units.

Blues honestly didn't mind either way. X wasn't a major distraction: he could carry on a conversation and work on this at the same time. The Hoppider hopped deftly up onto the bed, landing neatly on the blankets. It moved around the bundle, though, didn't disturb it at all, before crawling up the headboard and up the wall again. "You're not a distraction. This mechaniloid unit is well-built, but its programming was…they should all be able to do much more once I finish with this one and implement it on the others." They should be able to do more than crawl around and get underfoot.

"I'm surprised we didn't run into any in Neo Arcadia. They've been using modified mechaniloid units as scout and attack drones for the longest. It's how one of our earlier raids ended up going so badly and why we've had such an issue getting Reploids out of there before they end up retired. The Pantheons, though, and the Golems, they present the biggest threat, especially with those new Variable units they've built."

Blues looked up at X, frowning again. "We didn't run into any of them because I sent them away or ordered them to be _useful_." Useful by not attacking Blues or the people he was traveling with. "I…the Pantheons are not mechaniloids. I'd been sending them orders the way their superiors would have since there were often Reploids stationed with or near them." So all of them would have moved as a unit. He hadn't realized what they were until he'd had to knock Ciel out of the way and shoot them himself. Hadn't realized that they were…not animals.

"The Pantheons were a suggestion made to me by Fefnir early on. We needed a policing force that worked well but didn't require as high a level of Reploid intelligence. They're smarter than mechaniloids," and X hoped that hadn't sounded offensive to Blues, what with his affinity for the little units, "but they're only really intelligent enough to work as part of a unit, to serve as peacekeepers. To see them as they've become, as they've been modified…I can only wonder how Copy X convinced the Guardians and the Judge's Council that they needed to weaponize and mobilize the Pantheons." X was really starting to feel as if he were digging himself deeper into a hole where Blues was going to be left with no choice but to kick him out of the room just to get him to stop making things worse.

Those Guardians…they'd called Copy X 'Master X', the same way that some of the Resistance members addressed X here. So had they not noticed that their leader had been replaced? Were they _stupid_? X already said he built the Guardians—which was something Blues slated under 'Deal With Later'—so X was, for all intents and purposes, their maker. Their father, if they wanted to be sentimental about it. They should have been close to X, but given X's condition…did they also keep their distance, also only view him as an icon, as a leader?

He didn't want to tell X what he truly thought of his Guardians—namely Sage Harpuia and Hidden Phantom—because then he'd have to explain where and how he'd encountered them. He'd pass on that. He'd not met the other two, but if the ones he'd seen were any indication…

That copy would not have tolerated any insolence, would not have tolerated any dissonance. The Guardians hadn't seemed afraid of X in that room—the researchers had been terrified—but instead seemed to almost be riding on the coattails of his power.

So Blues was frowning again, holding very still with his shoulders drawn, wrapped in a very unpleasant memory even as he continued working on X's coding, continued working on that Hoppider.

"What's wrong?" X had noticed the shift in his brother's body language immediately.

"It's nothing. Your description of the Pantheons made me think of…something else." Something Blues wasn't inclined to elaborate on.

Something else? Something from Blues' time in the city? "Does it have anything to do with that bundle you brought in from Neo Arcadia?"

X apparently hit the nail on the head: Blues stilled again, but instead of frowning, his face was expressionless. As though he'd gone beyond anger and so, his program set his expression to neutral. Even the Hoppider had been meticulously avoiding walking on it, instead navigating around it, careful not to disturb it. Blues hadn't looked at it the entire time, hadn't shown any concern for it, but that made it almost even more obvious. There was something there.

Just then, the terminal in the room chimed, its screen bringing up a new window. A closed message for X, flagged as urgent, from Cerveau.

X pushed himself halfway out of the pod. "What was that?"

Blues didn't even look up, but on the monitor, the message opened up to display the text. "It's from Cerveau. He sent a message for you: Zero is awake."

X hovered out of the pod, feet touching on the floor. "I'll be back as soon as I can for the program," X said, "and thank you, Blues. For everything," for your time, for being willing to listen, for being the first person X could talk to in years. As soon as Blues had opened the door, X bolted for the lift, barely bothered by the fact that he actually passed through the lift on his way up to Cerveau's lab.

Well. Blues projected that X would be occupied for several hours. The door slid shut and locked in X's wake and Blues got to his feet and straightened his scarf again. His gloves were still on the ground, but he couldn't have them on for what he needed to do. He rolled his sleeve up again and headed to the bed.

He'd have time now, time to complete that program and time to look Rock over. Once he knew what needed to be done, he could set a schedule and get started. The sooner, the better.


	6. Necessary Repairs

_Welcome to chapter six! In today's little foray into 22XX, Zero is released from the medical lab, X helps the android get back into the swing of a few old (good) habits, and Blues finds more wrong with Rock's current condition. And this time, it wasn't Neo Arcadia's fault! Shock and awe!_

_ And for those of you wondering about the little Hoppider from the last chapter, he'll be reunited with his family. After all, Blues was just doing what comes naturally and helping out the little one._

**_ Disclaimer:_**_ Mega Man and all related characters and information are the property of Capcom Co., Ltd., Akira Kitamura and Keiji Inafune._

* * *

><p>X slowed only as he approached Cerveau's main lab, habitually dusting off his robes before signaling for the door to open and stepping in.<p>

Cerveau had Zero sitting on one of the examination tables again and was taking readings from his systems, checking him over to be sure that all was well with his body. Cerveau was mid-sentence when X entered the room, but he cut himself off and resisted the urge to bow: he knew that Master X didn't like it, but it was hard to break such a habit after living in Neo Arcadia. "Master X." Cerveau was surprised that X came so quickly, but this _was_ Zero. He hoped that he hadn't cut anything short. "We only just got him out of the pod," so X hadn't missed anything. "Your power levels are much more stabilized now," Cerveau told Zero, clearly relieved that they were. "Do you feel better?"

Zero nodded. "It's still a little odd that people are calling me Zero when I don't recognize the name, that everyone looked at me when I arrived in the same way they look at Master X, but otherwise I feel fine." He turned towards X, bowing his head. "Master X," he said softly, hoping he hadn't offended the Cyber Elf by answer Cerveau's question first.

It bothered X to no end that Zero just _insisted_ on using his title, that _Zero_ of all people kept treating him with such unnecessary reverence. Approaching the examination table, X had to resist the urge to punch Zero, and only partially because he knew the motion would only slip right through Zero's arm. Of all the times for him to not have a body…

"It's just X, Zero. Not Master X. You don't…you shouldn't bother with that title" not when you deserve it as much as I do, not when you _still_ outrank me "because you've got as much a history as I do, because you're…you're my friend. You have been. For years. For _centuries_." Why, why, why, why, _why_ had Ciel done this, acted before she'd thought things through? Why did she damage the only person that had been through all the hell of the Wars alongside X and _survived_?

Zero blinked, tried to access his memory banks, and was rewarded only with a blinking red alert window in his peripheral that the information that he was trying to access had been damaged and was not available.

"I know that you don't remember," had been accidentally made not to remember, "but that doesn't change things," X reassured him. "You're still Zero, with or without knowing it."

Zero smiled softly, nodding. "I'm sorry, X. This is all...a bit of an overload of data for me. For me to only have battle protocols," and nowhere near all the weapons he knew how to fight with, "and nothing else of who I am, it's...awkward, to say the least."

"Speaking of my battle protocols," Zero said, turning to Cerveau, "were you able to do any maintenance on my weapons?"

Cerveau smiled and nodded, "I did maintenance on your pistol, though Master X requested that I hold off on the saber so he could show you how to properly maintain it." Because the saber was something precious, something Zero would want to take care of himself. He moved to one of the tables near the examination table Zero was sitting on and picked up the pistol. It'd needed some work, needed to be cleaned, but he'd also been told that it'd been fired during the course of the escape, so it was still operational after so long. He handed it to Zero butt-first, the barrel pointing downward.

Cerveau retrieved the saber second; he'd kept it near his terminal, out of the way where it would be safe. He handed it to Zero as well, offering it up in both hands, the end that the blade came from pointing away from both of them.

The pistol was slid into its holster, but once again, the saber was treated to a greater deal of attention, hand holding the familiar weight, body telling him this was _his_, unlike the pistol, even though he couldn't remember. Pushing himself from the examination table, Zero stepped away from Cerveau before pressing the activation switch, the vibrant green blade forming, its gentle humming filling the room. A couple gentle arcs through the air, the soft hum following the blade's motion, and Zero stopped, turning the saber off. "It's been modified. This...this is my saber, but it's been modified. It's lighter than I remember." He looked to X. "Did you do something to it?"

X shook his head. "You did, before you were sealed in the pod. You redesigned the hilt so that it was lighter, so that it could roll easier in your hand. You...were always tinkering with your things, messing with them to make them work better. Your weapons, your Ride Chaser, your armor," X's eyes brightened at the memories, even with what had happened to the body Zero had begun his life in.

Gently dropping the saber into its holster, Zero turned and smiled at X. "You mentioned finding me a room earlier. Could we?"

X turned to Cerveau. "He's okay to leave now?"

"Yes, though I'd like to know if you begin to regain your memories, Zero." Doctor's orders. He wanted to see the logs, wanted to see what triggered it.

"Will do," Zero returned. "Where to, X?"

X shrugged. "Depends where you want to be at in terms of the base's levels." There was something humorous, although a little odd, in hearing Zero being okay with being around the medical wing of their facility, especially considering how often he'd go out of his way to avoid Lifesaver during their earlier years. "Second and fourth are closest to the Trans Server, but I'm not sure you're too interested in rooming on our more active floors. Fifth and sixth are further down, so they're further from the Trans Server when you're trying to get out for a mission."

Zero shrugged. "I guess with me being...like you in terms of how people see me..." Zero looked over to X. "What level is your room on?"

X stopped at this, almost embarrassed by the answer. "I...I don't have one," he admitted.

"What?" For someone as respected as X to not have quarters at the base seemed wrong. "Why not?"

"Look at me, Zero," X said. "I'm a Cyber Elf. I can't even" touch, feel, hold the people that matter, those that need comfort, "affect the world around me unless I'm interfacing with the data flow, affecting it through electronic signals. Why would I need to be quartered here?"

"That doesn't make any sort of sense. Everyone needs somewhere to go to relax and step away from whatever their day held for them."

"I have Cyberspace," X said. "It's my place away from here, and it doubles as an area where I can recharge, recuperate. It's just...it's not here in the same sense as the rooms."

"I still think that you should have a room here," Zero argued. "If nothing else, people will know where to go, how to find you, if the need arises. You can't be a leader to all these people, be so important, and be so willing to make yourself scarce just because you're not exactly like us. How is that being fair to yourself?"

"Maybe it's not," X agreed, "but I would rather we have the space for Reploids when they arrive here from Neo Arcadia than have to double-bunk someone because I took up a room that could have been used for them." It was only fair, only right, that those who needed a space to recharge, who needed a charger, a bed, were given those accommodations.

"I think you're giving too much credit to others and not enough to yourself. You're important to these people...and you're important to me, but you treat yourself like the world can walk all over you just because you're different. That's not a good way to live."

For someone who didn't even remember his own name, Zero sure had a firm grasp on his personal beliefs, so many that echoed of the Zero from before, the one locked somewhere in the shattered fragments of his mind. X smiled, shaking his head. "Maybe you're right," he said, "but for now, as I am, I am content with my decision. Should things change," should his condition change, "I'll look into taking your advice. Still, you _do_ need a room, and I have every intention of making sure you're settled in. So, what floor?"

"Lower, so fifth or sixth, I guess," Zero said. "Although I am curious to know if there's another way around the facility other than the lift. As...convenient as it can be, it's still only one lift for a lot of Reploids" and a random human or two. "It just seems a little poorly planned for there to be only one access point from one level to another."

"There are ladders between all the levels, and I realize that it does create an issue for there to be only one lift, but really, the parts we get" steal "from Neo Arcadia are put to better use as parts for the Reploids here. We manage well enough, considering. X neared one of the ladders, hovered down to the floor below, and waited for Zero to follow.

Zero looked down the ladder, saw X looking at him from the floor below, then gauged the distance between this floor and the next. Since the ladders only went from one level to the next, there was no issue with dropping down multiple floors, and Zero shrugged idly as he jumped down the access passage, impacting the floor with a dull thud, his body responding and reacting to the shock, compensating for the impact, and Zero stood, a triumphant smirk on his face. "Ha!" he exclaimed. "Seventeen and a half feet and I barely felt it."

X could only shake his head, thankful that, until they took back Neo Arcadia, no one was going to have to deal with Zero rediscovering his infatuation with Ride Chasers.

"What?"

"You'd probably be better off making those jumps by using your boosters to change your descent speed. A short burst would soften the impact." X turned to continue down the hallway.

Zero looked down at his boots, quickly checked the condition of his boosters and shrugged. "I guess so. I'll test it out if we have to hit the next level down." A thought crossed his mind, and he reached for X, frowning when his fingers passed right through X's shoulder. "Hey, X, where's the other guy we brought back?"

"Blues is one level further down, but I'm not sure he'd be up for having company," much less appreciating that said company would be the only remaining creation of Doctor Wily on the planet. "Why?"

"Well," Zero said with a shrug, "if you're not going to listen to me and get yourself a room, the least you could do is hang out with either of us. That'd be easier, I think, if he and I were quartered on the same floor."

Part of X's mind yelled at him that the only idea worse would be trying to get Zero and Blues to bunk in a room together, but he didn't bother voicing that thought. Last thing Zero needed fresh out of a century-long, amnesia-inducing stasis was a complex about his identity.

There had been enough of that a hundred years ago.

X moved away from the ladder, looking for the nearest access passage to the sixth level. Once again, he descended before Zero, waiting to see if the android was actually going to test out his boosters. Moving away from the ladder, he couldn't help the smile as Zero dropped down, whooping as he cut his descent off with a short stutter-burst of his boosters, landing a few feet away from the base of the ladder.

"That was _fun_," he chimed.

X rolled his eyes, turning and heading for the main group of rooms on this floor, empty though a number of them were. "You sure you're okay being on the bottom level of the facility?"

"I'll be fine," Zero assured. "Something tells me that Cerveau isn't going to let me off the base for a few weeks anyway, just to make sure that I'm actually in _full_ working order. Besides, you said it's quieter down here. I think I could use that to go over my memory files, see if I can make sense of whatever data is there, maybe fix it." His hand brushed against his saber. "I wonder why, out of everything I could have remembered," X included, "this was what I remembered most. There's probably so much more I needed to retain."

X rested a hand on Zero's shoulder, hoping the feather-light touch could provide the comfort Zero needed. "I'm sure you'll get your memories back in time, Zero."

"Thanks, X," Zero said, letting his own hand cover X's, careful not to push too hard lest he pass through the limb.

X's smile was comforting as he pulled away. "Let me find out what rooms are available, and we can pick one out."

Zero followed behind, stopping at the first door they passed, eyes scrutinizing the little steel nubbin on the door. Reaching up, he pressed his finger against it, almost reeling back when a peripheral window popped open. Looking at the small display, he was surprised to find that he'd been given the level, room number, and occupant name for the room. "What the heck?"

X laughed softly. "Identification fobs," X explained, "that work with standard subdural electronic interfaces. You've got sensors under your fingers that can react to these and provide a display of who is occupying the room. We normally don't use them for the information they carry, but they do help us in terms of knowing which rooms are being used." X's mind flitted to the fact that Blues' door still didn't have one of those markers. "Hmm. I'll have to make sure someone gets two more fobs made for you and Blues before the day is out."

"Are there two rooms available on this level?" Zero asked.

"Zero, I am _not_ getting a room. I don't need a room. I can't make real use of the room. I'm a Cyber Elf."

"What about when you get your body back? You still have a body somewhere, don't you?"

X stopped. "What makes you think I still have a body?" Were those memories somehow already coming back?

"It feels odd when I get close to you, like this isn't how you're supposed to be. I can't remember what you looked like before now, but this," he said, pointing to X's body, not hesitating to push his finger partially through X's shoulder, "isn't right, isn't you. _You're_ not you."

X huffed a slightly agitated sigh. "If I'm not me, how does picking a room to be quartered in make it any better?"

"At least you'll be treating yourself like one of the Resistance here."

"Zero, for the last time, no. I don't need a room, and I don't want a room. The other Resistance members can use the space."

"If you don't pick one, I'm going to find you one and make a fob for it so that no one can argue. From the way everyone seems to treat you," from the impression Zero had gotten about how to treat him, "no one is going to try and say that you don't deserve the space."

X groaned. "Fine," he said, "but yours first." In all honesty, X had no intention of picking himself a room, so if Zero went ahead and picked one for him, he wasn't going to argue. He had no belongings to worry about moving (at least not as he was now) and if the Resistance brought in a few new members, he could always give up the room if it was needed.

He really hoped that Zero didn't let Blues in on this plan. Last thing he needed was _both_ of them telling him to keep the room…

"So," Zero said, "I'm guessing that even with what Cerveau said, about me not needing to charge as often as time goes on, I'm still going to need a room with a charger pod?"

X nodded. "Yeah. You're going to need a desk to serve as a workbench for weapons maintenance. I…" X looked to Zero's weapon holsters. "I need to show you how to maintain your saber, since the tech is…a little dated. You can talk to Cerveau or Doigt, wherever he's gotten off to, about learning how to maintain your pistol."

"I meant to ask Cerveau about that. I…I know how to use a lot more weapons than this, than these two. I had a number of protocols and weapon proficiency skillsets load up in Neo Arcadia but none of the weapons to apply those abilities to. Did I leave them behind?"

X shook his head. "However it happened, you seem to still be able to use the weapons you owned before…before you were sealed in the lab. As far as I know, the only things we ever kept of yours were your saber and pistol. Everything else…" he shrugged "was lost to time and the world rebuilding around the remains of the Jakob Project."

"Something else I guess I have to talk to you about?" Zero said, smiling softly. "At least if my memory files never recover properly, I'll be able to sit down with you and listen to your old man stories about the glory days."

X's eyes went wide. "You did _not_ just compare me to _Andrew_."

"Wouldn't know if I did," Zero replied.

* * *

><p>Blues thought he was beginning to understand what was so appealing to humans about slamming their heads into walls. He grit his teeth, the metal grating harder than human bone would. He'd gotten Rock opened up and seeing all of the missing components was sickening. His trench coat was laid neatly at the foot of the bed and the padded blanket he'd brought Rock in on was spread out beneath the younger unit's body. The Hoppider was on the wall behind Blues, far from the bed and from Rock, shifting around a bit nervously. It picked up on Blues' stress.<p>

There was just so much missing. Had all of this really gone into his systems? Well, of course it had, he'd watched them do it through the cameras, but just…

He'd need a lot of parts. A lot of time, a lot of parts. He couldn't take them from here, not when the parts he needed weren't standardized, weren't part of what the Reploids used, so he'd have to arrange for Neo Arcadia to donate to his cause.

He'd have to go back there and connect to their network again. To do that, he'd need to jack the Trans Server here. Not a problem, he could slip into that after he finished with his examination here.

He opened another access panel along one of Rock's arms, checking the compressed buster components. As expected, a lot was missing from there. The other arm should have its full components, they hadn't checked the other, but as for whether they were functional…

But that wasn't what Blues had Rock opened up for. Blues produced a connection cable and hooked it into one of his ports, then into one of Rock's. This one was a connection for their minds. This port, this cable, was to send power from one unit into another. Blues didn't send enough to wake Rock up, just enough to send some power through his core, just enough to keep Rock in sleep mode while Blues checked his memory files, his programming, his protocols.

Except Rock's wireless wasn't up. Crap. Blues reached to his own neck, to another port, and ran a second wire between them. Connection established…no, do not exit sleep mode…yes, continue maintenance and file recover—wait. _File recovery?_

_ Status report._

After a few moments, Blues bowed his head, leaned down some, his shoulders shaking in grief and rage.

* * *

><p>Zero had finally settled on Room Five on the lowest floor. While being so far down would prove problematic, he at least wanted to be near the lift and ladders in case a quick response was needed.<p>

X idly wondered if Zero remembered he could use the wall as a jump point. He'd have to see if any of the Resistance members knew that ability and could teach Zero. Short-burst booster fire was a whole different concept than his ability to hover…

Zero looked at the desk tucked against the far wall, considered the layout of the room, and dragged the desk to the middle of his quarters.

"What are you doing?"

Zero pushed the small chair over to the desk, looking over the room and realizing that he was going to have to head back to Cerveau's lab to get a cover for his table. If he was going to be cracking his weapons open for maintenance, he needed something to keep his work station clean. "Well, I _was_ going to sit down and ask for your help in learning how to take care of my saber, since you and I seem to be the only ones who know…since _you're_ the only one who knows how to maintain it, but…" The blonde looked at the metal table and shook his head. "I'm sorely lacking in supplies if his lab is any indication."

X nodded. "A little, though it's mostly just cleaning supplies you need, things to ensure that the table doesn't hold any dust, and a demagnetizer. Probably should have a field repair kit's equipment cloth, since they're static-free and…" X's voice faltered. Standard field repair kits came with a small swatch of padded cloth that, while repelling static, also kept parts from rolling away or being lost while weapons were undergoing emergency repairs in the field. Those little strips of cloth, however, weren't the only way the material was used; in some cases, larger sheets of the cloth were used to transfer Reploid units from the field because the cover provided kept dust and damaging particles out of their systems when internals were exposed to the environment through damage. He'd seen them used enough during the Maverick Wars when they were getting troops evacuated after fallback orders had been issued.

He'd seen a similar material resting in a heap on Blues' bed…

"X?" Zero asked, wondering about his friend's sudden silence. "X, what's up?"

X shook his head, as if clearing his thoughts. "Nothing," he replied. "It's something I'll take care of later. It's not important right now."

"Okay." Zero wasn't going to push. "You were saying something about a static-free cloth?"

"Yeah," X replied. "The cloth doesn't hold a static charge and it'll keep the parts from rolling off the table while you're working on your saber. It'd be best if we got those things first. Want to see if your wireless is working, or would you just want to send a message to Cerveau?"

"Wireless would probably be better. I need to link up to comm and security anyway."

"Zero," the brunet chided, "you're in no condition to be responding to any of our alerts, even if there were any."

"I'm fine," he returned, "really. All my systems are in the green, except for the memory files, so I'll be okay if they need me. Anyway," Zero said as one eye grayed out, "what's the access code for the communications network?"

X quickly provided the code, watching as Zero's eye turned black again. "You connected?"

"Yep," Zero returned. "Wow. Chatty bunch."

X laughed softly. "Yeah, they can be. Especially with what we found in Neo Arcadia last night, so it really shouldn't be that much of a surprise."

"What did they find in…?" Zero blinked. "Oh, right." He looked down. "Don't tell anybody I did that."

X looked at Zero for a moment, humored by the fact that the android hadn't immediately understood what X had been talking about. "Don't worry. What's a secret or two between friends?"

Moving to the seat he'd pushed up to the desk, Zero dropped down, reclining a little as he sent an open broadcast onto the network. '_Cerveau, do you have a minute?_'

Cerveau was a little surprised that Zero contacted him that way, but then he remembered that Zero probably didn't have his ID code on file and it'd be better for him to get used to the public channels. It'd be best if he got comfortable talking to everyone on the base, Zero would settle in and be happiest that way. _"Yes, is there something wrong?"_ Cerveau's voice was friendly, but a little concerned.

'_Just need some supplies, Cerveau. I need to do some work on my saber but I don't have everything I need._'

As soon as it was clear that Zero wasn't in any situation that required his presence on the network be ignored, a number of the Resistance took note of his signal ID code and started sending messages through to him.

Zero felt almost overwhelmed for a moment, letting out a sharp '_Hold on a second!_' across the network. '_Sorry,_' he said a moment later, '_I'm just a little new to this and I have more peripheral message windows up than I know what to do with._'

'_Zero-sama,_' one voice called out over the link, '_is everything alright?_'

'_I'm fine,_' he answered. Had the rest of the base not been informed of the situation with his memory files? '_It's been a long time since I've been on a network of any sort, and I don't know everyone here yet. It's a bit overwhelming and_' if this wasn't a shot in the dark… '_a lot more informal than I'm used to._'

'_Our sincerest apologies, Zero-sama,_' the voice replied after a moment of comm silence. '_If you would like, each of us could send you a brief message with our signal ID codes and names. Since you're broadcasting on the public channel right now, everyone can hear this, but the codes will let you talk with each of us individually when you have time._' There was a brief feeling on the network, as if this unit had reminded all the others who, exactly, they had just mass-messaged, and that he was not to be treated like any normal newcomer at the base.

'_That would be most appreciated,_' Zero answered. '_Thank you._' Minimizing the message peripherals, even as more came in with the requested data, Zero reached out again. '_Cerveau, are you still there?_'

_ 'Yes, I am,'_ Cerveau replied readily. He'd stepped back when he saw how many messages Zero was receiving, let the ancient Reploid take a minute to juggle them. It was careless of the others to overload him like that, careless and rude. _'You want some supplies to clean and maintain your weapons? I can have some sent down if you don't mind waiting a couple minutes,'_ for Cerveau to pack the items up and send a mechaniloid down to deliver them.

'_If you don't mind,_' Zero said, '_I need a field repair kit, a demagnetizer, and something to clean the table off. If there's anything else that you think I might be able to make use of, send it down, please._' Silence for a short moment. '_And can you send a message with your name and comm code? I need to start filing these things and I might as well ask now._'

Cerveau smiled, but sent Zero the message straightaway: he had a feeling that there'd be a lot of back-and-forth. _'I can get you those items…there are some chemicals used to clean the pistols, too, so I'll send some of that along. Even if I'm not available when you need supplies, leave an offline message for me: I always check them,'_ since he coordinated supplies as well as looked after everyone's health.

'_I'll keep that in mind,_' Zero answered before returning his attention to the rest of the signals around him. '_I'm going to break off from the net for now, but I'll start responding to messages as soon as I get everything sorted out and have responses messages ready._' Not waiting for a reply, Zero disconnected. "Alright, X, supplies are on their way. We'll get started as soon as they arrive?"

"Sure," X answered with a nod.

* * *

><p>Rock's files were corrupted. It would be convenient to blame it on those in Neo Arcadia, but Blues could tell after just a few seconds that no, this was wear and tear from age, from time. This was a result of Rock being in disrepair for so long.<p>

In all honesty, Blues was lucky his own weren't corrupted. He and Rock both dodged a bullet there.

He was sitting on the bed beside Rock now, wires still connected, one hand on the small robot's shoulder as he went through Rock's files, separating the corrupted from the uncorrupted ones. Rock's base programming was intact—that was very good—but much of the damage was in his memory files. There were chunks missing, sometimes entire wars, entire years. It would still be Rock once he woke, but a very disoriented Rock, a very confused Rock.

But. Like Zero's, his files were only corrupted, not wiped. They could be restored. And if not…well. There were other avenues to pursue, should it come to that.

So, he'd have to examine him thoroughly, compile a shopping list, obtain the parts, get him repaired, and then he could worry about charging him and bringing him back online. From there…well, that'd give him plenty of time to decide what to do about his current situation.

He allowed Rock's systems to log his scans, log that he'd come in to take a look and poked around some. He'd add it to the logs every time he went in—it was the right thing to do—so that when Rock did come online, he'd know what happened.

He just needed to ensure that Rock's mind was as intact as it could be before coming online. He did _not_ want Rock waking up with some of his self missing the way Zero did. It would be even more unacceptable given that Blues could help with the file recovery.

Mentally, he adjusted his schedule for those mechaniloids so that Rock's recovery would be prioritized.

As he examined Rock, he continued working on X's program. After the second hour passed, he'd decoded all of X's program code. It really helped in that it outlined all of X's included mental defenses. Now Blues could really customize to X's systems and give him something truly compatible, something that his systems wouldn't have to adjust around.

It'd fit him like hand in a glove.

If Zero proved to be as nonthreatening as X claimed he was, Blues would consider making something similar for him.

They'd both need it before long.

He unhooked both wires from Rock after disconnecting from his mind, then gently pulled the plugs from his own ports. He wound the cords neatly, then closed up Rock's ports. He knew that the Reploids here wouldn't suspect that Blues was doing anything remotely like physical lab work in here. Only X had seen Blues' variable system, but Blues doubted that he'd fully considered the implications in that.

Blues doubted that X would wonder why he had a lab work setup when he was a combat-oriented Robot Master.

The fabric that he'd wrapped Rock in was the kind that was resistant to static, which was why Blues had taken that over anything else, so he knew that Rock would be secure in there.

He was careful to wrap him in a way that wouldn't accidentally loosen or unfold, then laid the trench coat over the bundle again and rubbed his forehead with a sigh.

Well, at least the program was nearly completed. And the work on the Hoppider was finished too. It was skittering around quite well now, as well as able to hop around, catch things, recognize components…

Sneak into Neo Arcadia's storehouses and take the needed parts…

Now he just had to figure out how to deter X's questioning.

* * *

><p>Another forty minutes passed and the program was ready. X wasn't on the network, though, and Blues did take the time to look. Well. That was annoying.<p>

After a moment's consideration, Blues generated a false origin point for his signal, along with a false identifying signal. It was easy to weave a sufficiently Reploid feel into the account and Blues "logged in" to the communication network, quickly sending a message to Dande the way he'd seen them doing to one another. _'Do you know where X currently is?'_

Blues paused a moment to wonder if that was polite, but he decided not to worry about it; the message was already sent.

Dande's head lifted from where it was resting on one of the security team's station pods. Hands moved over the holographic controls, minimizing a few of his security feed windows once another one of the monitors had verified she was picking up the feeds for him until he'd addressed whatever had come up. Opening the message, his eyebrows rose behind the helmet before he sent a connection verification signal to Blues to establish a private comm line. '_Blues-dono, I received your message. Please give me a moment to see if I can find anything._'

Opening a search window, Dande quickly set the command to search for X's last point of connection with the comm network, as well as any communications sent out for him. It took only a few seconds for the search to locate Cerveau's message. Seeing Zero's name, Dande redirected the search to Zero's name, opening a second window to trace Zero's signal to whichever wireless transceiver he had connected to. The Level Six terminal sent back a response at almost the same time as X's identification fob request popped up in the search window from the same floor. Well, that _was _probably the best place to start. _'Blues-dono, I have not seen a recent connection for Master X, but I would suggest that you begin your search on Level Six, Room Five. Will that be all?'_

_'Yes, thank you.'_ That was all he needed. So now he supposed he'd be going door-to-door until X ended up being behind one of them. He'd left earlier because Zero had awakened, so he was probably still with him. Blues paused at that, but then decided that no, that'd be no more dangerous than anything else he could do. Though Zero entering this room was far out of the question.

He summoned the Hoppider to him again and bent down to scoop it up. It was more than happy to be carried anywhere, especially since Blues thought it was such a good little unit, so it settled down in his arms quickly.

Room Five was just down the hall from his, naturally, so it didn't take him long to walk over. He paused at the door and considered opening it wirelessly, but no: it'd be best to appear as…Reploid-like as he could at the moment. So he lightly touched the access panel, holding the Hoppider in the other arm. The door opened obediently. Really. He was seriously the only one that locked his door? That seemed…foolish of them.

Zero looked up the minute the door opened, only noticing that he'd dropped his saber's acceleration ring as the metal cylinder clattered heavily against the table, his hand immediately dropping over the item to keep it from being jostled any further. He hadn't been expecting company, though he reflexively folded the cloth over the more sensitive internal components as the door swung shut. "Hi, Blues," he called, looking at the arachnid unit nestled in Blues' arms.

X turned once the door opened, just as surprised by Blues' presence as Zero was. "Hey," he said, letting himself drop to the floor. "What brings you here?" X was caught somewhere between mute shock that Blues had left his room and tense apprehension that he'd come to _Zero's_ room. "Is everything okay?"

Blues seemed a bit…not quite confused by the door's mechanics, but puzzled nonetheless. But he turned his attention to the room's occupants, his gaze lingering over Zero for a few moments before answering them. "Hello. Everything is fine. I completed the program." And he wanted to hand it off to X as soon as possible. "I also completed the new programming set for this unit," he hefted the Hoppider slightly and a few of its legs wiggled. He was holding it like it was some kind of pet, like it was a puppy.

X's countenance brightened immensely at this. "Oh, okay," he replied. "Do you want me to introduce you to Rocinolle? I know things got…a little hectic earlier."

Zero turned his gaze downward, towards his saber components, unable to keep meeting Blues' intense stare. Picking up the acceleration ring, he started working on loosening the side cover to take a look at the miniature magnetic field generator stored within, ensuring that none of the pieces within had been damaged or destroyed. Zooming his optics, he began going over the item bit by bit.

X turned to Zero for moment, as if considering what he was doing. "Zero, as soon as you're done checking the acceleration ring against the schematics I loaded for you," X was spending a lot more time than he wanted uploaded to the local networks, "go ahead and send a request to Cerveau for a new condenser chamber. There's a hairline fracture on the one you've got now, but there's no permanent fix to that that doesn't risk the unit blowing if you're not careful. I'll be back shortly."

Zero nodded, a wire-thin tool pressing one of the smaller pieces of the generator back into place. "I'll be fine until you get back. I've got the schematics, but I'll keep track of any questions I have until then."

His voice was almost emotionless when he answered: he was tinkering, X realized with a soft smile, something that he'd done quite often during his down time. "Ready to go?" he asked Blues, moving for the door.

Blues nodded mutely and followed X from the room. He considered asking for Zero's programming code, but perhaps it was more important at the moment to do things here that would be visible to the rest of the Resistance. And the sudden increase in usefulness from the mechaniloids would be very, very visible.

X touched the panel for the lift, his energy thrumming against it, and the soft hum of the magnets in the wall sounded as the lift began its descent. "Y'know," he said, tilting his head to one side as he looked at Blues' Hoppider, "for these little ones to not have much in the way of facial or body language mechanisms, it certainly looks like it's happy."

"That's because it _is_ happy," Blues said. "They all want to help. The Resistance members become frustrated with them, don't they? It made them sad," because they wanted to do better, but couldn't. "So being shown how to function properly, being given the tools it needs to fulfill its duties…made it very happy."

X smiled again, reached forward, letting his hand graze over the little unit carefully, unsure if it could actually feel his touch. "I wouldn't say they were frustrated so much as they are upset that Rocinolle couldn't get them working better." X pet the Hoppider again, wishing that he could actually feel the spider's body instead of trying not to pass through it. "You have to understand, Blues, you and I…we see the world differently. If something is wrong," X stopped as the lift settled into place, boarding and waiting for Blues before continuing. "If something is wrong, with the network, with a Reploid, with one of our mechaniloids, we have to look at it like a human would. We don't have the same kind of interface, the same kind of connection, so a failure at improving something isn't seen as something wrong with the unit that needed fixing, it's something wrong with the Reploid tasked with fixing it."

Blues nodded slightly, though it was impossible for X to tell if he truly understood that mindset. Blues wasn't so much blaming the unit as he was pointing out that they were asking for a painting, but gave it only powder dyes and sticks to paint with, and a cracked slab of concrete to paint on. You'd get a painting, but it wouldn't be a good one.

"It's not the unit's fault that it couldn't do its job, and if the programmers can't…say what they need from it properly, then it won't know what to do. That's why we were made." The idea of a 'smart' robot working independently of a Robot Master was just a myth. "They are…like children, or small animals. They are our eyes, our ears, our hands. We give them what they need to do their jobs, we provide the tools they need. And they're happy only when they can do what they were made for."

"To hear you say that makes me feel all the more pissed off at Copy X for weaponizing nearly every non-human in the city." To know that the mechaniloids were made not to fulfill their programming but dragged further into that stinging disappointment when they continued to prove incapable of doing well for their masters? "Will you be able to fix all of them?"

"Of course." Had his intent been to stay in Neo Arcadia, he'd have taken every single mechaniloid unit in the city. He'd wanted to take the units in that warehouse—they'd been so elated with him—but he knew he couldn't. He was glad he hadn't: the questions would have been unbearable.

The lift settled into place one level above where they had started, X moving off and proceeding down the first hallway to the left. "Rocinolle's got the biggest room on this level since we've got so mechaniloids here that need to be repaired before we can reactivate them. She's fallen further and further behind, though, with all the problems that keep cropping up with the rebuilt units."

Blues blinked at that. "Problems?" Were they breaking down after repairs? Or was it a programming issue? His own directives were really waking up now and he had a feeling he'd have a hard time leaving that room in time to get things started for Rock. Damn it.

"Couple of things, really. One is the fact that every unit here is actually reclaimed from Neo Arcadia on raids. Low-intensity shots at non-critical areas to incapacitate long enough to get to the manual power switches still require a bit of work to get them back up and running. The other issue is the fact that whoever Copy X has running the production facilities, all they're doing with these units is giving them an update chip. They're not even bothering to look over their programming at all, just upload the new program and act like it's all better. The data doesn't even install right, from what we can tell. It's like a bad patch job, and that's being _gracious_."

Blues did not think that was remotely amusing. They—if they were going to be updating programming, they should take the time to do it _right._ He knew that it would take every ounce, every shred, of self-control he had to not kick the city face-first into the dirt the next time he had access to its network. He'd brought it to its knees the last time, but that was really a not-so-friendly warning. He'd let them have it back, after all.

He didn't know if he'd be able to do that a second time.

There was one thing he could do right now, something that wasn't fixing his teleporter and taking down Neo Arcadia. He could help the ones here, at least guarantee that they'd be happy here.

No wonder this little one was so _relieved_ when he initially called it over.

"They're throwing together 'patches' and tossing them over the programming without integrating it?" And they wanted the mechaniloids to function?

This wasn't an inadequate painting. This was lobotomizing them then asking them to run advanced equations.

Blues' rage at that thought actually made him tremble even as his face remained completely calm.

"I'm sorry." X was apologizing a lot, and it was really frustrating to not be able to tell if it was really his place to be doing so. Although his body was needed as the last piece to Dark Elf's cage, to abandon the city as he had, to leave everyone there and not even have a contingency plan set up to deal with the worst-case scenarios, made him feel partially responsible for Copy X's rule and the current state of the once-grand sanctuary city. "If it's any consolation, Rocinolle does know enough about programming that she's been able to remove the chips and repair what she knows of their code. Your work will help a lot, though, since you understand it better."

Blues didn't understand how these Reploids understood so little about programming, how they could understand so little about _how they ran_. He knew that being angry at X wouldn't help anything, especially when X wasn't directly responsible for what was going on in Neo Arcadia, even if he was its rightful ruler.

After all, when Doctor Wily died? The Wily Numbers didn't fall apart into panic and despair. They were self-sustaining and looked after themselves and each other. Robot Masters weren't small children that needed herding. X wasn't a child either, so neither should those based off him be so helpless. Or was it that the Reploids were so close to humanity that the mob mentality actually could take charge in certain situations?

"I am not upset with you," Blues clarified. X didn't have to apologize. "It's…not a situation that should have been surprising to me. I'll look at the units and show Rocinolle what needs to be done in the future."

She could probably benefit from some real lessons in coding.

Rocinolle looked up from her workbench as the door opened. "Master X," she greeted, then resumed working on the right wing joint for the Condoroid unit she'd been working on. Wait…

Turning around, Rocinolle was shocked to see another unit walking with Master X, one that she hadn't met before and…what in the name of the Guardians _was he wearing_? Whoever this unit was, he looked more like he'd walked off the set of some movie that used to play in Neo Arcadia's theaters before Master X's copy banned all non-biologicals from the facilities. "Sorry," she apologized. "Got a little caught up with the Condoroids the guys brought in a few days ago and…" She stopped, took a calming breath, and resumed. "Hi," she said, offering her hand to the new Reploid. "I'm Rocinolle, the Resistance's non-medical mechanic. And you?"

Blues was still carrying the Hoppider in both arms, so he didn't take the offered hand, though he did nod at her. He knew that was an acceptable greeting and acknowledgement among humans and so, should be okay with Reploids, too. "Blues," he said, glancing sidelong at X. He half-expected his little brother already had a story cooked up to explain his presence here.

"Nice to meet you," she said, dropping the hand as a trio of Securipiders dropped from the ceiling, trilling softly at the unit in Blues' arms. When the little unit responded, Rocinolle finally took note of the Hoppider Blues was carrying. "Oh!" she exclaimed. "Erin, I was wondering where you'd gone off to! Thanks for keeping an eye on him," she said, smiling at Blues.

X laughed softly. "I don't think it was too much of a deal, Rocinolle. Blues is a program coder from Neo Arcadia. We found him on our way out of the city on the run from a Pantheon unit." It was, in effect, the truth. No one had really asked Blues that many questions, save Milan, and even then nothing that pertained to Blues' life in the city.

"Glad to have you aboard," Rocinolle said, smile unwavering. "Another good Reploid with us is one less Reploid suffering in that hellhole of a city."

Another short trill from the Hoppider in Blues' arms was met with a series of longer chirps from a gray-black conical metal…thing in the far corner of the room, six new Hoppiders jumping from the container and jittering over to Blues' feet, chirping and humming at the unit that Rocinolle had called 'Erin'.

Blues knelt down and gently allowed the Hoppider unit to crawl from his arms. The unit continued trilling happily, though seeing it with the others, the changes Blues made were far, far more noticeable. Blues' head turned toward the unit that the other Hoppiders had emerged from, still half-kneeling, even as some of the other Hoppiders began probing at him experimentally with their legs. "Is…that a generation unit?"

At first, it was as if Rocinolle hadn't even heard Blues. Her eyes, and her attention, were focused on Erin, watching the little Hoppider move and chitter, shocked at the improvements that had been made to its motion programming. Blues really was a lucky find if a few hours of work resulted in such drastic improvement. _Man_, she thought, _I have so much to learn from this guy_.

X reached out, grazed Rocinolle's shoulder, and she snapped up, looking at him.

"Oh, sorry," she said quickly. "Did I miss something?"

"Blues was asking if that was a generation unit," X said, pointing to where the Hoppiders had come from.

"Oh," she said with a shake of her head. "Well, first things first, I want to thank you for whatever you did for Erin's coding. I know he needed it…and I know that they're technically genderless and that it's not normal for them to be named, but since everyone else on the base is assigned a name in place of their serial number from Neo Arcadia if they hadn't already picked one, I started doing the same thing." She stopped, catching herself as she had started rambling again, and settled once more. "That thing over there is a storage and charging unit for each group of Hoppiders. It's called a Kumoteru, and unless we're able to recover that along with the seven assigned units…I haven't yet figured out how to change their response codes to reassign them to a different Kumoteru."

Blues nodded. So, the Kumoteru didn't actually generate the Hoppiders. That was a shame, but still, storage and charging was good. Something like reassigning these to different charging units was something very basic, but Blues didn't voice that. "I see…I take it you have units here that need to be reassigned, then? I'll address that when I look them over." Blues also didn't mind the cover identity that X provided for him—a program coder was…the least suspicious, he supposed. And X had been right about Blues not wanting them to know he was a Robot Master, so acting as a network administrator for them was currently out of the question.

Even if the security and communication networks were already his.

"Well, they have to be reassigned to Kumoteru I've built, since I've set up codes for them but can't sync the loose Hoppiders we've recovered. Aside from that, we've got the three Securipiders here: Izzy, Tucker, and Sai. I was working on one of our twelve recovered Condoroids when you came in, and there's a ton of other units in the storage room that haven't even been reactivated or have been and then glitched. Having someone who specialized in coding will really help out, since my assignment in Neo Arcadia was more geared towards building and system maintenance. I just tinkered with the mechs in the buildings where I worked when I had nothing else on my roster, learned coding from a friend of mine before he got retired. Stupidest crap ever what they're saying equates with being Maverick, huh?"

X nodded. "Well, I'm no real use here and Zero needs my help with his saber maintenance, so I'll leave you two to it, if that's alright? And Rocinolle? Don't stay up too late. I know you want to get the units back on their feet as soon as possible, but we've been back from the city for nearly seven hours and I don't want to hear you kept yourself out of charger again because of all the excitement on the comm channels." X shook his head, though he did smile. "I'm going to jump on there again and kick everyone off if they're on there much longer. Security can only do so much if Neo Arcadia decides they want to pick on us when our combat units are napping."

"That assumes those dolts can find us," Rocinolle returned. "Be well, Master X, and tell Zero I'm sorry about the message spam earlier. I think we're all a little excited to have another legendary Maverick Hunter in the ranks."

"I'm sure he doesn't mind, but try to keep the comm chatter to a minimum with him, let him get oriented again. He's been in stasis for a while and I don't need him overloading trying to keep up."

Rocinolle nodded. "If you're there when he's podding for the night, remind him to run a diagnostic and defrag if he hasn't already. Goodness knows he needs it."

"Will do," X answered. "You'll be okay here, Blues?"

Blues had already lifted one of the other Hoppiders off the ground, looking it over. "I'll be fine. Thank you, X." This unit was well-maintained as well, it looked like. So the issue with all of them was with coding? That'd be quick to clear up. It was honestly a bit of relief to have something to do during the day, when he wasn't working on Rock. And he had a feeling that X would be pushing for him to be 'social', so perhaps this would suffice.

Rocinolle didn't miss that Blues didn't add the honorific to Master X's name, her eyes dancing between the two long enough for X to realize what she was so surprised by.

"Well, I guess that was eventually going to come up," X said, tone soft and even. "Rocinolle, the reason Blues doesn't use my honorific is that he was one of the coders that came onto the staff a few years after we finished building Neo Arcadia. I've known him for years, and he was working with me for some time before the citizens started using 'Master' to address me."

Rocinolle still had a bit of the Neo Arcadian respect driven into her, it seemed, because she faced Blues and bowed. "Forgive me for questioning you, Master Blues. I was not aware that someone from so far back survived in that city this long."

"Don't worry about it," Blues dismissed her concern. It was a bit…strange to be addressed that way, though it wasn't as though he'd never been regarded as such before. Perhaps not in words, but the feeling? It was unlikely that X realized how hierarchical the Robot Master social structure was and he was certain that the Reploids here didn't understand it, so they were just being polite the way humans were. He had to regard it that way, strange as it was. "Why don't you show me what units you've been working on and we'll go from there?" He wanted to at least get the rest of the Hoppiders fixed up.

He was pleased that his calculations returned that this detour to Rocinolle's lab would actually push his timeline up.

X nodded to them both, a parting gesture, before turning around and heading for Zero's room.


	7. Shifting Allegiances

_Hey, look, surprise chapter! Courtesy of the Protomen concert today and the piles of happy Midnyght Saber and I made of because of said concert, we're launching a special release chapter._

_ For all of you who have been wondering about the state of Neo Arcadia and what's going on in the city that Blues metaphorically kicked in the face, here's our return to said city and the disorganized panic that's been bleeding all over the streets since Blues murdered the power grid. The Guardians are at a loss for what happened and how the city was offlined, Phantom can barely stand being in the same room as Copy X, and said copy 'bot is absolutely livid at how inept the entire city proved during this debacle. Oh, and Neo Arcadia is about to take part in a very impromptu (read: forced) charity drive courtesy of a particularly pissy Robot Master._

_ And remember that comment about The Phantom Gamer not showing up as Fefnir again until chapter 38? Um…well, surprise again! Turns out he took up the helm of the Jin'en General for this chapter. That 'battery' comment later on? Yeah, totally him. You know you love him._

_ Once again, Midnyght Saber and I thank you for your continued readership and support, and we look forward to your comments and reviews!_

_ **Disclaimer: **Mega Man and all related characters and information are the property of Capcom Co., Ltd., Akira Kitamura and Keiji Inafune._

* * *

><p>Copy X kicked at the base of the cover on his pod, barely fazed by the loud squeal caused by manually forcing the cover up, grunting as he pushed to try and free himself. His efforts were cut short as a large hand grabbed at the base of the pod cover, forcing it up and freeing him from the confines.<p>

Alerts had flooded his vision after the power came back online and rebooted him out of an errored hibernation, so it took a minute before he realized that Fefnir had been the one to help him out of the pod. "What happened?"

The frustration was quickly apparent in Fefnir's voice as he assisted Copy X out of his pod. "The whole damn grid went down about eleven hours ago, on top of every alarm in this place going up at once. We've been scrambling to get the city - the whole friggin' _city_ - back up since then, and we just got enough juice running through this place to finally get to your chamber. It's been almost absolute anarchy out there, Master X. We've managed to find out that a hacker was responsible for the system failure, but Phantom was somehow booted from the system before he was able to get a lock on who it was or where they were accessing the network from."

Harpuia stood a short distance away, his head resting against one hand. "Comm went back up about half an hour ago, Rekku and Jin'en units are backing up the Pantheons, and we've managed to get most of the city back to operational norms. The real issue, though…" he said, stopping and rubbing the side of his helmet gently, trying to assuage the pain from the sudden rush of data and communications when the network popped back online. "The real issue is that the two progenitor units we found…the researchers reported that one unit activated after the power grid went offline and escaped with the other. As it stands, we think the Resistance was behind this, considering one of the underground facilities looks as if it was broken into, but we have no idea if it was them or if anything was actually taken from the facility. It looks pretty ancient."

Copy X pushed himself from his pod, noting that Leviathan and Phantom were both stationed at the door, fairly certain that Phantom's assassins were still stationed outside the room. "Do we have any idea where the unit went after it left the lab?"

Harpuia shook his head. "We have found no trace, Master X."

"Any indication if there are plans for a second attack? Has anyone bothered to ensure the grid's defenses are back online?" Copy X was barking orders now, acting like someone who had been woken up far before he was supposed to be.

Phantom stepped forward and made a quick, short bow. "Since I was kicked off of the network, I have personally been unable to sign back on. However, I have some of my unit monitoring the net for the moment, and should anything else happen, they will _hopefully_ be able to warn us in time, if not stop the threat themselves." Phantom shifted uncomfortably under his master's astonished gaze.

"What do you mean, _hopefully_?" Copy X snapped. "And how the hell has the city's best network operator been _banned_ from the system? Don't you have unregistered access codes?"

"The true problem is that the attack happened so suddenly that we had no idea if there was any indication of a hacking attempt at the time and, since the day's log history has been deleted, we can only assume that there will be some sign of attack before it actually happens. And, yes, I do have unregistered access codes." Phantom could only shrug, unable to explain what he was about to tell the individuals in the room. "They're gone."

As commander of Neo Arcadia's naval fleet, Leviathan's duties didn't exactly coincide with what'd happened to Neo Arcadia, outside of rushing her own forces in to help bring some semblance of order back to the streets. Her own Meikai Army had been slow to respond because, well, without the communications grid online? They'd noticed it the second it went offline, but then there was confusion amongst them and it took her a while to grab her troops by the scruff of their necks and give them a good shake. Training. They'd had training for this.

Apparently, she needed to step it up.

This sort of massive hacking was previously thought impossible and to be honest, she was impressed. She had no idea who had the gumption to conceive something like this, let alone actually follow through and pull it off. But still, it'd done considerable damage to Neo Arcadia, to its people, even if it was mostly self-inflicted. "Don't you think the list of casualties is more alarming?" Leviathan's voice was languid from her position at the door, though she still commanded attention. "A lot of innocent humans were killed last night, by our own units. Many of our own Pantheons and Golems are being retired for just that."

Copy X froze at the mention of human fatalities. For units to attack _humans_? Reprogramming was out of the question—it wasn't possible, even with low-grade Reploids like the Pantheons. Had they been given faulty orders to attack on sight? But… even then, they had _scanners_, systems that double- and triple-checked to verify biological or mechanical in their targets. "Were any of your armies directly involved, or was it just the city patrols?" If it were the patrols, that would mean the directives being issued in response to an alarm trigger were corrupted, modified somehow. If the Guardian armies had been involved?

The Judges were not going to be pleased with the Guardians or the rate of retirement at _all_ if it turned out that the units under Guardian command had taken part in the massacre.

"So far as we are aware," Harpuia replied, "none of the units under our direct command were involved, but with communications shut down, we had a hard time coordinating our troops. Fefnir alone lost three platoons in the eastern sector of the city, and we had Pantheon Flyers and Aces taking potshots at Rekku troops for the first few hours. Nine of my troops were gunned down in the crossfire." Harpuia felt bad that the numbers were so skewed between him and the commander of the Jin'en forces, especially since they were renowned to be the best fighters in the city. He guessed that being a purely ground-based force, however, presented some issue against the heavily-armored Golems. An entire company of those units would present a tremendous threat to practically any division of Neo Arcadia's military.

Fefnir grit his teeth at that last remark. "You don't have to remind me that this hacker, whoever the hell he was, made my superior fighting force look like a bunch of mewling _Pantheons_," he spit the word out as if it left a foul taste on his tongue. "If that bastard ever shows up at our doorstep—"

"We'll be more concerned with protecting our citizens, should he show up at our doorstep," Leviathan cut in before Fefnir could find some more colorful language to describe their mystery hacker. Hackers never attacked head on, never appeared before their opponent the way Fefnir preferred. They used less direct methods of attack and Neo Arcadia had lost this round. "None of my troops were shooting humans," she added, to answer Copy X's question, "But there were quite a number of city patrols that would attack anyone who tried to intercept them or discourage them. We spent most of our time protecting the populace and trying to get some semblance of control back on the streets."

Fefnir's hands curled into tight fists, his rage seething as he sought out something, _anything_, to pummel into the ground. "I know that. I _know_ we have a duty to protect the little meat-sacks that live all cushiony in their homes while we try to keep the lights on. But some total asshole just waltzed in, cut the power, drove our peons nuts, stole our batteries, _locked Phantom out of his house_, and waltzed right back out. What am I supposed to do, sit on my ass and wait for round two? That's Gloomy's job!" He jerked a thumb at Phantom. "Oh wait, he _can't_ right now—"

Phantom leveled an icy stare at the Jin'en General, his patience for the Reploid's bloodthirst having run out. "That is _enough_. However strong you are _outside_ of the network makes no difference _inside_ the network. My losses may not have been as physical as yours, but they were just as—if not more—severe. Consider, Fefnir, you've lost an entire company of well-trained and competent soldiers. Staggering, yes, but you can move on. I manage the intelligence network and _I'm locked out_. You say all you can do is sit around and do nothing? That's what I'm stuck doing _until I can get back to my job_." Turning on his heel, Phantom stormed out of the room.

"Hey, Phantom, where the hell do you think you're going? We're not done here!" Fefnir called out to the Zan'ei commander's retreating back.

Phantom stopped for a moment, looking back over his shoulder, and replied, "I'm going to go do something to try and fix my problem. What about _you_?" With that, he signaled the lift, striding onboard and leaving Fefnir staring blankly at the spot where'd he'd been only a moment before.

Leviathan closed her eyes when Phantom stormed past, then tilted her head toward the enraged Fefnir. "I understand your frustration, but right now, we don't know who the hacker is." So until Phantom could get back onto the network to investigate, they were kind of stuck. "But…Harpuia, you said that one of the progenitor units walked out of the building _after the power was cut?"_ She looked between the three male units in the room: had anyone addressed _that?_

Harpuia shook his head. "We've asked every member of the crew, and they've all said the same thing. They had been working on the red progenitor for a while by then and had just finished the repairs when everything in the room went dead. They weren't even aware until some time after the progenitor had left, and taken the other with it, that the entire city had been shut down."

"Has anyone said that it may have been the progenitor unit that shut down the net?" Copy X asked.

"That wouldn't have been possible, Master X. Preliminary scans showed that it didn't have wireless access on the network and the cables that they used to link it into the room terminals can't manage that kind of link, especially not once the connection was severed. Additionally, the terminals that were recording the data from the progenitor were compromised in the power outage, so we cannot tell what actually rebooted the unit."

"Wait a second," Fefnir cut in. "If the unit couldn't manage a connection without the cables or a wireless link, that basically means one of those damn Reploids that brought them in let someone know about their find."

Again, Harpuia shook his head. "I was looking over the reports from the team when the power went down. None of them, at least as far as I've seen from their logs, opened a communication channel at any point save to alert the city that they were en route for early return with precious cargo."

Fefnir grunted, agitated. "So it's something in the comm network. How long would it take to see if there's a leak somewhere in the damn system?"

"Rather than standing around here, bickering and arguing about where we _may_ have security weaknesses, why don't the three of you get back out there and _find out_ how someone hacked our network?" Copy X was agitated by the general ineptitude of his city. Human fatalities, disorganized Pantheon and Golem response teams, Phantom's inability to access the network, and to top it all off, the loss of the one thing that could have saved the city from eventual destruction when the power plant finally failed… "Dismissed," he said, waving the three remaining Guardians out of his chambers, "and don't come back until one of you has _answers_."

Bowing, the Guardians quickly exited the room.

Copy X sighed in frustration, dropping into the chair by his desk, setting his systems to defrag as he opened a message window, alerting the Judges that they would need to report to an emergency Council session. He informed them that the session would address the recent security breach and making sure that something was done to check and, if need be, reprogram the alarm systems to ensure that if it happened again, the city patrol wouldn't start gunning down humans along with everything else that crossed their paths.

* * *

><p>Phantom hadn't bothered with the lift after the doors had closed. The sooner he was away from that <em>thing<em> wearing Master X's face, the better, and he had kicked open the lower access panel, closing it behind him as he dropped from the lift car. Plummeting down the narrow shaft, he fired his boosters just before he reached the third floor, grabbing one of the power cables than ran along the wall and vaulting through an access tunnel into the maintenance passage behind. While most of the Reploids in the city were unaware of these tunnels, as mechaniloids were tasked to these areas, Phantom and the Zan'ei units used the vast network of tunnels and passageways in the city's underbelly to move around without being tracked.

Moving quickly through the tunnel, eyes adjusting to the darkness, his mind continued to replay the conversation he had inadvertently walked in on, a conversation between Master X—the _true_ Master X—and the nameless hacker that had brought their city to its knees.

_That doesn't change what I said. If you claimed admin rights on the network, why didn't you recall the Pantheon squads that were sent down here? Why weren't they redirected off—_

Phantom could only guess that Master X had fallen silent because Phantom's signal had registered on the network.

Had he surprised the android that much?

The Pantheon units that had been sent 'down' somewhere probably meant the four squads that had been found near the abandoned lab, along with several units wearing the uniforms of the Resistance. Was Master X working with the Resistance? Was he aware of what was going on in the city and actively countering whatever…whoever was currently in control? If that was the case, why hadn't he contacted the Guardians or the Judges? If they had only known, if they were aware that the unit commanding them, they would not have continued to follow a corrupt leader. And what had they _found_ down there?

That didn't even touch upon the comment about the hacker claiming admin rights…there was only one who could claim administrative control over the network, but even then, they would have had an origin point. If Master X wasn't controlling the network, if another had taken administrative control, they had to have cloaked their origin point…

That kind of skill, the abilities necessary to wrest control of a network from Master X…

Only one other unit Phantom knew of had that capability, and he was lost to the world.

_Wait…_ Phantom stopped short, moving into a shadowed nook in the maintenance tunnel, his wireless signal remaining offline to keep anyone from tracking him. _If there was a reason for them to be in the city, if there was something they were looking for in the underground chambers…_

_ Did they find Master Zero?_

Phantom quickly pulled up his map of the surrounding area, finding an access point that led further into the city, and he dropped down, catching himself on the bottom of the ladder to keep from impacting the puddle some ten feet further down. If it were more than a puddle, Phantom had no intention of finding out. Vaulting from the ladder, he air-dashed past the puddle, catching himself again on a fractured chunk of wall. The smell down here wasn't as foul as raw sewage, but the stagnant pools of water were emitting their own…particular scent throughout the hall. These areas had been long forgotten, ignored in favor of keeping the surface safe, keeping the humans alive.

Phantom was mentally cursing himself for not finding an area closer to the lab, setting his boosters to low-burst as he bolted along the wall. _If I take the next access tunnel and route around the industrial district…_

Throwing a kunai ahead of him, it embedded deeply into the wall above the grating that covered the access tunnel, and he dashed across the passageway, grabbing the kunai as he pried the metal cover aside.

He needed to see that lab himself.

* * *

><p>Harpuia leaned back against the far wall of the lift car, fingers still rubbing at the side of his helmet.<p>

"What the hell happened to you anyway?" Fefnir asked. "You been rubbing at your helmet like you can't get a scorch mark out or something."

The Rekku General only shook his head, remaining silent for a moment longer. "I…made the mistake of leaving my comm channel up during this whole debacle and it came back on in a flurry. It was as if every message that had been sent onto the network while it was down sent all at once the minute it was back online, so I'm still trying to clear the backlog and deal with the fact that I'm in real-time with my troops."

Fefnir laughed. "That's what your ass gets for being all but perma-logged onto the comm channels."

Leviathan was the last to board the lift and she rested the base of her ranseur on the floor, treating it a bit like a staff. The only channels she was hooked into were the ones with her own Meikai troops and those she kept open with her brothers, Master X, and other necessary channels. But general communications? With the chaos going on outside? No wonder Harpuia had a headache: she couldn't imagine that cacophony. "Were any of the alarms your troops responded to last night at all genuine, or was each a ploy?" Hers had all been false: the only true emergency was Pantheons and Golems attacking innocent civilians.

"They were all false. Every last one was a setup, save for the alarm triggered by the progenitor unit's escape."

She frowned and tilted her head, considering. It was odd enough that the unit was even able to be conscious, but to be able to stand and move around? "I imagine that they must have been in terrible shape, but do we have images of either unit?" She'd think that the progenitor unit couldn't have gotten far, but they'd been working on him, right? "If the unit is still in the city, we need to be on a lookout for either of them." Spread the word and keep an eye out for anything unusual. "How well-repaired was the unit?"

"He wasn't fully repaired," Harpuia explained. "There are still missing components in the buster, so it may or may not work all that well, if it can activate at all. I didn't really get into detail about that with the tech crew. Mobility would probably be okay, and it had undergone a full surface reconstruction," synthetic skin and hair, "so it might be able to blend it better with the citizenry. From what they said, its features would indicate male model type. Best we have in terms of pictures," and this was said with a shrug, "would be whatever we could get from the lab's feed from about an hour before the outage. Our best bet would probably be to keep a look out for the energy reading off of its core." That, at least, was the one thing that stood out from every other unit in the city. It would be like a beacon light comparatively.

Ah yes, the fabled power reading. Leviathan thought that if what those researchers claimed was true…she didn't believe in a god, but something like that would be a _godsend._ "If he was still in the city, we'd have sensed him by now, unless he could cloak himself," and that was said with a great deal of doubt. It'd be better to have this conversation with all four Guardians present, she thought, but when Phantom was frustrated or was working on something, he was next to impossible to be found if he wanted to be left alone. "What of the second unit? You said the first one took it, so its repairs weren't completed?"

At this, Harpuia fell silent, eyes very quickly diverting to the floor.

Fefnir shrugged, a look of disappointment thrown at Harpuia for being so bothered by the answer. "Master X ordered the second unit scrapped for parts to repair the first. Unit had a solar core, though, so that was going to be sent down to research for an evaluation or some such shit. Not that it's worth anything now since they're both gone." The statement hadn't carried any emotion, any feeling other than annoyance that the city's 'batteries', as he'd called them, were now no longer in their possession.

"He ordered the second unit_ cannibalized?"_ Leviathan looked to Harpuia, as though for confirmation. His grim expression was proof enough. "They were both reparable and he ordered the second one to death?" She was shocked by the lack of emotion in Fefnir's voice: he should be properly offended by this, not shrugging it off as though it didn't affect him.

"I think," Harpuia said, and it was evident by the strain in his voice that he was having a hard time speaking, "that the order was given because…we don't have as much in terms of the supplies that would have been required when our own citizens and military need the same components for their own repairs. Not only that…but…" Harpuia was practically grabbing for words, "it may have been…because of age. Older parts…even if they're a little worn…are better than…than incompatible new parts."

"I don't see what the big deal is," Fefnir pointed out. "I mean, yeah, they were old, but neither of them were working when they came in. Even with what happened with the one, they're just old models."

"The _big deal_," Harpuia spat back, "was that the second unit wasn't just scrapped for parts. The _big deal_ was that the second unit could have been rebuilt. Yes, our forces need the parts, but these are…were…part of Reploid _history_. And let's not…let's not even get started at the similarities between the second unit and Master X."

"Fefnir," Leviathan said slowly, though her tone had dropped and her voice was cold and sharp as ice. "Those two units could have been repaired. They were, and are, by our standards, _still alive._ They weren't dead, Fefnir. _They weren't dead."_ Leviathan tore her gaze from Fefnir and focused her attention on Harpuia, her voice still sharp as a blade. "Harpuia, what do you mean, 'similarities'?"

Harpuia raised shaking eyes to his sister. "Levi," he started, the pain in his voice having nothing to do with the discordant roar of communications still screaming in his ears, "Levi, if you could have been there, in that room…if you could have seen them…and seen the second unit…" He stopped for a moment. "It…he looked like he could have been Master X's _brother_."

Her eyes widened, but Leviathan's face fell. She…Master X never spoke of his past, never spoke of what came before him, of where his origins laid. But surely, if that'd been…

She knew Master X. She knew the kind of person he was. If these units were truly from his past, he would not have scrapped them. Even if the parts couldn't be obtained now, he'd have ordered them into containment, had them put into storage until they could be repaired.

It was true that as each year passed, as life here became more desperate, Master X had to…make some difficult decisions, that he had to do what he could to sustain the city.

But if that was true, why was Harpuia so strained? Had it been that uncanny?

What in the world was going on?

* * *

><p>The eight Judges pushed themselves to their feet as Copy X entered the chamber, bowing in respect to the leader of their city.<p>

Copy X remained silent as he ascended the steps to his seat at the center of the assembled. While generally used only by the Judges and himself, the room was large enough to hold several more individuals. The room itself was circular, and the crescent-shaped table where Copy X and the Judges sat was raised several feet above the rest of the floor. In the city's prime, long before Copy X had been unceremoniously shouldered with responsibility for the city, the room had been used—as the Judge honorifics would imply—as a courtroom for the legal matters that bore the greatest importance to the city.

He was not aware of the history as much as he should have been because this was the room that, in decades past, had seen sentence handed down against the mastermind of the Elf Wars and his abomination of a war machine.

Now, however, the decorum simply served as a reminder of the lavish days of the city and the democratic process that had been crushed under the booted heel of military autocracy.

"This is an outrage and cannot be allowed to continue," Deathtanz Mantisk said, smacking his fist against the table, resuming whatever argument had begun prior to Copy X's arrival. "I understand that there were human fatalities last night, Biblio, but you have to understand that punishing the units directly responsible only wastes the lives we are destroying. Has anyone bothered to collect the units' serial number before they are sent to be retired? Has anyone looked into who their programmers are? Perhaps someone should see why their response orders resulted in them targeting the humans!"

"I said nothing to indicate that I approve of the automatic retirements, Mantisk," Volteel Biblio countered. "I simply stated that, at present, the quickest way to resolve the tensions and fear in the city are to remove the units from duty. The law, however, states that any units acting against the interests of the city's human population are to be retired since the reprogramming option available to mechaniloids does not apply to Reploids."

"But you are blaming the wrong individuals," Mantisk returned.

Tretista Kelverian nodded. "I second the judgment that something must be done to the units responsible," and his head ticked to the side as he shifted his active thought circuit, "but we risk this happening again if we do not address the core problem as well."

Cubit Foxtar raised his hand in a sign of agreement. "It would not be difficult to have someone check the programming code for the alarm systems. If the instructions provided to units during an alarm response remain too vague, this may not be the last we see of the security force going Maverick during a state of emergency."

"What kind of punishment would be suited for the programmers," Childre Inarabitta asked, leaning his head against one hand, "should it be proven they were at fault for this incident? We cannot simply retire them when this city is already suffering for the lack of skilled technicians."

Blazin' Flizard ruffled at this. "You intend to leave them alive, let them continue to work and teach newbuilts, when their work has led to _this_?" The Judge tossed a data pad across the table, the device clattering to a stop in front of Inarabitta. "Look at the counts, Inarabitta! You cannot sit back and think we suffer more by making an example of those fools!"

Inarabitta idly flipped the data pad over, looking over casualty numbers he'd already memorized after the information had been sent when the communication grid came back online. "Flizard, don't act like I haven't seen this. I _know_ what the figures look like. It doesn't change the fact that, just like the humans, our numbers haven't recovered that since the Elf Wars. Sure, on a mass scale, our numbers have skyrocketed since then, but that's if you _count_ the Pantheon units."

Glacier Le Cactank piped up them, bowing his head in apology to Inarabitta. "I believe that what Childre is trying to point out is that he's discussing actual technical crew, Reploids with full-scale intelligence programs and the things we suppress in the Pantheons. We start flat-out retiring those involved regardless of what can be done to correct the issue, without taking into consideration the fact that things can be done, and we will be sentencing our own kind to their doom. We need those who can work with the programs, who know how to build us, both body and mind, and to destroy that very support would risk tearing the city apart and leaving the humans to their doom without our assistance."

Mantisk nodded. "Very true, very true. They are not immune to radiation, to the toxins of the planet where the biodomes do not protect. It is why our units used to be sent in their place into the wasteland. To lose the ones responsible, trusted with our creation would be a killing blow to both our races."

Hellbat Schilt knocked against the table, drawing the group's attention. "Listen," he said, pointing to Flizard and Inarabitta, "I don't approve of my taking sides with either of you since a simple disagreement meant to remain outside of this room is so able to taint your actions within," and that was said with no small degree of disdain, "but an example needs to be set without creating further problems. We need a task force put together, though the decision of staffing would likely be out of my control, in order to determine exactly where the problem originated. Find those most responsible for the carnage out there, those who played the greatest part, and retire _them_. Let them serve as an example to the rest that ineptitude and shoddy workmanship will not be tolerated. Too much has been lost through the violence of the past and we cannot afford to teeter any closer than we already are to absolute destruction."

Copy X leaned back in his chair, looking at Schilt. "If we were to assemble this task force, what would their purpose be? To decipher the coding and figure out who is to be held responsible, right? For that, we _need_ coders, programmers, to provide that information. How would you go about finding those who were involved without them being part of that very task force you speak of?"

Foxtar replied quickly. "Master X, if I may, the coders are assigned to several programming projects. It is possible to draw individuals from assignments that are not directly related to the city's security and the Pantheon production lines."

"You say that as if it doesn't underscore recent legal changes in the city," Flizard shot back. "What would we look like after making it illegal for Reploids to shift out of their assigned projects?"

Foxtar bristled at the reminder of one of Master X's more recent changes to the city work structure. "Under Master X's orders to organize the workforce, we banned the Reploids _themselves_ from requesting location or project transfers. If we make this decision, if the Council determines who is to be transferred, it does not serve as an exception to the law. Our decisions in these matters are not under the same restrictions as we have placed on the citizenry."

"We are exempt," Inarabitta concurred, "and can make the decision. We also have the option of reassigning a small group of individuals to comb out the best coders from unrelated projects. However we want to operate this, it can work and will also provide us with an idea of what went wrong. As much as I hate the idea of retiring any one of our race, and I will let it be known to the Council now that I will not approve the retiring of the programmers found to be at fault," he said, tapping his fingertips against the table for emphasis, "we need to know what happened. We need to find out what went wrong, do so as quickly as possible, and correct it before it happens again."

Mantisk nodded. "I will second Inarabitta's dissent for any future judgments against the programmers, and also second his argument. We are legally able to reassign Reploid programmers at will. Even with the law you referenced," he said, pointing to Flizard, "we were able to enforce the reassignment of every unit in the city _after_ the law had been passed."

"Half of this Council stands willing to undermine our own efforts at maintaining order in Neo Arcadia!"

"Half of this Council understands that those that make the laws are able to operate above those laws when it benefits our entire society," Le Cactank shot back at Flizard. "We understand that, for us to maintain order in this city, especially with the security issues raised by this recent attack, changes have to be made to whatever fault exists in the system as it is now. Without programmers to check the code, without the skilled examination of units outside of the group we are currently viewing as being at fault, how are we going to prevent a second incident that may prove even more devastating than this?"

Copy X leaned forward, rubbing his helmet crystal, trying desperately to not grow aggravated by the Judges' general inability to keep their petty differences from affecting their decisions while convened. "As I understand it, we need to determine what went wrong with the city's response teams, if what happened was a programming error, the party or parties responsible if it was, and then determine the punishments that will be meted out. This does not include the units currently slated for retirement for being directly responsible for the human casualties listed in the reports." He leaned back. "We need an investigation team comprised of programmers that are not part of the group targeted as responsible."

The Judges all nodded their heads, each realizing that the vote was about to be called.

"Flizard, your vote?"

"I think this entire plan is a charade and a waste of time. Retire the security units and retire their programmers."

"Schilt?"

"I've already made my views clear on this. Form the investigation team and retire those most responsible."

"Le Cactank?"

The Judge cast a disproving look at Schilt. "The matter at hand is only the investigation team, not what some of us may want to be done when they have completed their task. Form the team."

"Foxtar?"

"I agree that an investigation is merited."

"Inarabitta?"

"Form the team," he answered.

"Volteel?"

"I agree with Foxtar. The investigation is merited."

While Copy X sat on the Council as a tiebreaker if the case merited, Volteel's vote was the fifth for the investigations task force, providing the majority vote.

"I will ensure that Harpuia and Azure Falcon are made aware that the units' serial numbers are to be recorded before they are retired to ensure that we have a comprehensive list of what units were responsible and, by proxy, the programmers we will be investigating. However, for the sake of the vote tally, Kelverian, what is your consensus on the matter?" Copy X turned to the Judge seated at his right, waiting for his three thought circuits to reach either unanimous or majority agreement.

"I arrived at consensus moments ago," he informed. "We need the investigation completed. We need to correct this matter and determine who it is that is responsible and how it can be fixed."

"Mantisk?"

"My vote is with the majority."

Copy X nodded. "As I see the inherent value in this measure, I will side with the majority as well." That placed the votes at eight to one, Flizard the only dissenting member of the Council. "Foxtar, I want you to work with Guardians Phantom and Harpuia. As our chief information and communications officers, they will help you to form the task force."

Pushing himself to his feet, Copy X moved for the door, stopping just before leaving the room. "Thank you for your counsel in this matter," he said, "and I expect to see results within the week." The door closed quietly behind him as he exited.

* * *

><p>Phantom checked through the grating to ensure that the area was devoid of any Neo Arcadian units before kicking the grating, knocking it off of the wall and dropping to the floor just outside of the still-open lab door. Careful to replace the access cover, Phantom double-checked the halls before darting past the doorway and into the chamber beyond.<p>

Once inside, he switched his visual input to compensate for the lack of light in the room. While the hallways outside had been sporadically lit by flickering lights that were still clinging desperately to those last few watts, this room was devoid of light. Whatever had been in here likely drained the last bit of the power remaining, since this facility was not connected to the Neo Arcadian grid.

Moving for the pod and the computer system in the center of the room, his eyes darted to the metal ring suspended above the pod, shocked to find that it look scarily similar to the designs for a containment field generator, a device designed to keep whatever was inside of it from getting out. As far as he knew, only high-level security access rights would have allowed the field to disperse.

And Master X had said that he was never given the codes necessary to release Zero. To free him, to bring another of the legends back from the world of myth, would have required a skilled technician. If they had been able to wake Master Zero, roused him from the hibernation he'd been locked in…

It would have explained the power grid going down. Disrupt the power and the containment field would no longer retain the one caged within.

Leaning over the pod Zero had been kept in, he was a little startled to see pieces of armor and wiring littering the bottom. He knew enough about the warrior's second body that finding a chunk of one cheek guard left Phantom wondering just how badly off his father's friend had been by the time they had found out where he was being kept. A flash of something, a spot of wire-thin material, and Phantom reached down, coming up with the last piece of proof that the Resistance had indeed found Zero.

He held a trio of long blonde hairs, felt them snag as he lifted them, and carefully untangled the strands from the diagnostic cables. Pulling against them, he verified the tensile strength. These weren't human. How the fibrous strands of hair had been severed, broken off from the android, was something he would try to figure out later. Rolling the strands around his fingers, he tucked the hairs into one of his vest pockets, looking around the room for another moment before darting back out. Another piece to the puzzle had fallen into place, but there was one thing left to verify.

How had they gotten back out of the city? The tunnels that the Pantheons had reported from at the beginning of the pursuit had been blown apart by weapons fire, cutting off the escape route in that direction, which meant they'd had to use an alternate Trans Server somewhere in the near vicinity. Searching through his files, Phantom opened up the saved map file for this level, smiling a bit when he realized that the area where Zero had been located wasn't even marked. As far as the city above was concerned, the lab and the hero once locked inside had not existed until the night before.

He darted down the hall to the first of the Trans Server bays in the area, though it was not the closest by any stretch of the imagination. If Master Zero had thoroughly covered their tracks, hidden their escape point from the notice of Neo Arcadian forces, it was likely that whatever Trans Server they had used carried no data about the jump point, let alone its activation and use. Without a log of the transmission, Phantom would be looking for other signs of use, signs that the area had been disturbed. Realizing that, he took to the walls, dashing along the worn stone and metal as he moved through the twisting maze of passageways that crawled beneath the heart of the city.

* * *

><p>Rocinolle was a blessedly competent student. She was attentive and eager to learn, and she picked concepts up <em>quickly<em>. She had a genuine, vested interest in improving the robot (mechaniloid) units and, so, followed every direction Blues gave her without complaint. She had questions, naturally, but he rarely had to explain something more than once.

That she was getting tired and that X already warned her to not miss her charge cycle helped move things along. They'd gotten through the Hoppider units (or, at least, the functioning ones) and Blues quickly patched them to accept new Kumoteru as their homes. It was a matter of uploading the altered code to them after wiping them to their default state. She'd seemed surprised by that concept, but he explained that leaving unnecessary lines of coding in was both wasteful and inefficient. Better to clean the old things out before adding the new.

But now she'd gone to her charge pod for the night, and Blues to his. Or, at least, that was the implication even if he never stated where he was headed. He waited approximately fifteen minutes and then summoned seven fully-charged units to the room with the Trans Server. Judging by everyone's network signals, he had a four-hour window in which he could expect the majority of the base to be asleep.

That was more than enough time to do what he needed to.

Accessing the transportation network was as easy as the others. He knew that much of security was still online, but they had no idea he was up and about, had no idea that what was being fed into their view screens was archived footage of empty halls with a new timestamp. He'd spent the day monitoring their movements, but they didn't really ever leave their posts, didn't physically patrol the base.

It shouldn't have come as a surprise: no one here even locked their doors, so why would they need foot patrols?

There were several parts that Rock would need that weren't on file, parts that were probably included with the technology lost with the Robot Masters, and the specialized parts that Blues needed for his teleportation unit were definitely unavailable.

He had the schematics on file, and there were plenty of mechaniloid-run facilities that would be more than happy to make him what he needed.

Timing was all that could be impacted, but he knew the back alleys, the untraveled routes between the warehouses: he'd studied the layout of Neo Arcadia extensively. There were plenty of back-alley routes that supplies were moved between that the populace didn't have access to. The Pantheon patrols could be an issue, but they wouldn't be able to tell his orders from genuine ones.

If worse came to worse, he had his buster. So long as he could get in and out, he'd be in good shape. And after, Rock would be feeling much better, he thought.

Then he could begin to address Rock's memory issues.

And, he realized, X hadn't picked that program up from him, had he? They really hadn't had a chance to and Blues wanted the opportunity to show the android how to use it: it wasn't something you just installed and were good to go. He didn't have the preset programming to intuitively know what to do with in, so X would need practice and Blues would much rather his practice not come during X's first necessary real-world application of the program.

As expected, he made it to the Trans Server's chamber undetected. He had the Hoppider units assemble on the platform with him, then hacked into the Trans Server's interface. He didn't permit the machine to log the coordinates or this use of it; it would appear as though it remained dormant the entire time on the activity logs.

In a stream of shimmering light, Blues and the Hoppiders disappeared.

* * *

><p>They rematerialized in a similar shimmer on an underground Trans Server in Neo Arcadia. It was a remote, unused Trans Server, hidden in a labyrinthine maze of passages and locked storage rooms. It was the same one they'd used to escape the night before—its obscure placement meant it was unlikely there'd be people guarding it, and there was no way Neo Arcadia would know that that was the specific one used—but he still remained on guard, half expecting to have at least one confrontation during this business trip.<p>

Rocinolle didn't even notice the battle protocols he'd improved and added to the Hoppiders. He wanted them to be able to defend themselves properly.

He kept an eye on the clock as he moved. The Hoppider units were still staying near him, though some had scaled up the walls to crawl along the ceiling. They were happy and contented, alert and ready to do their duties, but they remained silent.

He wasn't expecting to be intercepted during this little…charity drive event, but he did still need to display some degree of caution. They wouldn't be expecting him to return to the scene of the crime, he knew, though when the scene was an entire city?

And they had _no idea_ he was back on their network.

He knew from the network that they were on the lookout for a hacker, assumedly a Reploid, and were scouring possible terminals that he could have accessed from. In other words, they had not a clue. He knew that they found him from his core's energy reading and, so, he'd been pointedly blocking them from detecting it. Or rather, blocking the detectors from retaining and sending the data. There was little he could do to turn it down; his core was temperamental and fickle and any attempt to regulate or suppress its output resulted in a painful episode.

* * *

><p>Finding traces of the Resistance here was difficult. The bodies had been removed already, so the only markers Phantom really had to go off of were the scorch marks and occasional pieces of shrapnel dotting the walls.<p>

The intensity with which he was scouring the corridor for clues did not affect his perception of the world around him.

He heard footsteps. And the rhythmic clicking of the arachnid units used as scouts by the city.

He did not want to be found down here. Not now. Not if the reason he was down here would be brought up.

Ducking into a nearby access tunnel, the grating having been partially destroyed and hanging from a single hinge beneath the opening in the wall, Phantom was careful to keep himself fully hidden within the unlit passage and prayed that the Hoppiders or Securipiders didn't find his hidey-hole.

When a form in a long black coat, trailed by a unit of Hoppiders, ran past him, Phantom didn't know what to think.

Waiting until their footsteps had faded into the distance, Phantom crawled out of the tunnel, dropping quietly to the floor before moving in the opposite direction. If they'd come from that way…there were only two ways in, and the first was an access panel that had been welded shut years ago.

He bolted for the Trans Server room nearby, hoping that the system was still active and displaying transmission coordinates.

Looking into the room, Phantom was a little surprised to see the machine humming, its screen bright. Moving over, careful to keep one ear on the hallway outside the room, he found the machine was still displaying its coordinates, the Guardian quickly committing the data to memory. If this was where that Reploid had come in…

He looked around the room, finding a grating covering a maintenance tunnel a short distance from the Trans Server. It was high on the wall and, like most of the passageways, unlit. It only took a matter of seconds to remove the grating, slip into the confined and dark space, and lock the cover back into place.

Now, all he had to do was wait.

* * *

><p>Blues had to move more carefully now that it was daylight outside. The power had been restored—as of perhaps three hours ago, if his timer had counted down properly—but he didn't stop to see how the city was doing.<p>

He honestly didn't care how the city was doing.

With their new movement programming, the Hoppiders were easily able to keep pace with him. He knew that he couldn't afford to stay here long; he was jamming their sensors, keeping them from registering his power source, but the more quickly he got in and out, the better. There were things he could do to dial it back as well, but, well, he was fortunate that the Resistance base was insulated as it was; Neo Arcadia would likely have sensed him otherwise.

He'd have left the base as soon as he was able had that been the most likely turn of events.

As it was, he knew he was taking a risk by coming here, but he would have those parts. The Resistance couldn't provide them for him and if Neo Arcadia was just lying here, ripe for the picking?

He didn't feel any guilt over stealing the parts; the treatment of Rock and himself aside, he honestly didn't see a single thing wrong with stealing parts that were necessary for one's own survival.

He made contact with his chosen facility immediately upon arrival down in the Trans Server room: it was unmanned by any Reploids. He quickly uploaded the order he had and the schematics for the parts that the mechaniloids didn't recognize (there was a depressingly large number of them), then had them prioritize those on the queue.

Forty minutes.

At least some of the time would be eaten by him getting there.

There were storage rooms that were insulated in the warehouse and he waited in one of those as the parts were being made. He hung back on the network, bit back the immense urge to just bring the whole city down again, bit back the urge to master the city properly, to manage and maintain it so that it'd _work_. His programming was almost screaming at him to _make it right_, there's so much wrong right in front of him and he could be doing something about it. He didn't look up anything pertaining to the humans, didn't look up at how they were faring or how this city was affecting their well-being.

The absolute last thing he needed at the moment was the First Law coming up in arms. Out of all of his directives, that one was the hardest to resist, the hardest to ignore. It was one of the shrewdest and its song never ceased, only varied in volume.

It'd been blessedly quiet while he was surrounded by Reploids.

His Hoppider units were minding the mechaniloids in the warehouse's production chamber and providing him with constant feedback, so when several came to retrieve him, he was already opening the door and on the way out.

The Hoppiders carried the parts, packed neatly into static-proof cloth, each part wrapped individually, the whole parcel boxed up with some sort of insignia on it. Was that Neo Arcadia's symbol, then?

He paused only long enough to verify the inventory in the boxes with the Hoppider units, then began to rush back down to the underground, where his signal would be fully cloaked, where he wouldn't have to constantly feed their sensors false but varying data on the power outputs of the city.

Even the barest glance at the power grid made him grit his teeth.

That he was making good time pleased him, distracted him from the massive frustration that was Neo Arcadia. It'd only been, what, an hour and a half so far? Excellent. He'd be long-settled in his room by the time the base began to wake again. They'd not suspect a thing.

Blues was in a hurry and, looking back, he would consider that to be the only fault in his plan. He was on a timeline; he couldn't dupe Neo Arcadia indefinitely, not without a more visible takeover of their network, though underground in these tunnels, his signature would be blotted out. Only those scanning in the tunnels would pick up on him.

The Hoppiders were performing to expectation, deftly keeping up with him and bearing the box without any unnecessary noise. Only the rhythmic tapping of their metallic limbs on the tiled floor gave their position away. Blues knew that coming down here would be risky—it was relatively near to Zero's lab, even if his route didn't take him in that direction. But he needed the parts for Rock and the parts for his own teleportation capabilities. Once he could get that repaired, he'd at least be able to move freely.

The Trans Server obediently flickered back to life when he entered the room and he stepped up to its transportation pad without hesitation, the Hoppiders gathering at his feet, carrying their burden securely. Wirelessly, he set the coordinates again and set the Trans Server unit not to log its activity, the coordinates, or even that it'd been active.

It took half a second, if even that, from the time Blues stepped onto the platform to the time the Trans Server activated and teleported him and the Hoppiders out in a stream of shimmering light.

* * *

><p>He'd lucked out. Despite the worry that had been gnawing at him, Phantom had been proven right in his original assessment—that the Reploid he'd seen earlier would return to the Trans Server to get back out of the city.<p>

There was no small amount of shock at the fact that no one had yet seemed to register the Trans Server as online, and were it not for his inability to access the network, he would have considered jumping online to inform someone of the security breach.

Then again, if this were a member of the Resistance?

It would put Phantom one step closer to finding out where Master X had gone to and discovering what was known about the mystery hacker that had overrun the city network not even twenty-four hours prior, though he was almost certain that Master Zero was the one responsible.

The soft chitter of Hoppider units silenced Phantom's mind, the Reploid hunkering down in the tunnel and lowering his system functions to the point that even the city's handheld scanners, were the agent to have found one, would not register his presence.

He could not fathom the depth of his relief that he'd turned off his vocal modulator when the Reploid returned.

This unit was no Reploid.

Even after all the work that had been done, all the changes that had been made, Phantom recognized this one.

It was one of the progenitors. But…what was he doing in the city? And how was he getting around without being caught? If anyone on the surface had half a mind, they would be scanning for this unit's energy signature. He would have nowhere to hide from Neo Arcadian forces, and yet he had slipped through their net _twice_ thus far.

As the Hoppiders walked in behind the progenitor, Phantom couldn't believe his eyes. A box. They were carrying a box. With Neo Arcadia's seal on it, the normally blue insignia tinted the deep red of the manufacturing district.

He was stealing parts from the factories.

A wave of relief crashed over him at the thought. If those were parts…

If he had been determined enough to remove the second unit from the lab while he was making his escape, made the other unit's safety his priority, it was likely he was using Neo Arcadian supplies to repair the other progenitor. Were it not for his need for silence and stealth, Phantom would have broken down into tears of relief at the thought.

He remained still for several long moments, only daring to move once the lights of the Trans Server dimmed to indicate that it had powered down. By now, Master Zero would have locked the Trans Server on the other end, kept it safe from those who might be watching from the city above. Though there were so few down in these areas anymore, the precautions still had to be taken. Moving for the unit, it only took a few seconds before Phantom realized that there was no record of the transmission point.

Still…

He had the incoming coordinates.

He had a location he could find, as long as he could get to the maps.

Darting for another passageway in the ceiling of the corridor outside of the room, Phantom clambered up the narrow shaft, bringing himself high enough above the devastated remnants of the city foundations that his presence, while still cloaked, would not risk him being found out. Even with the cover story he was building, he wanted to be safe. Proving himself unworthy of the false Master X's trust would sign his retirement orders before he could even _think_ to leave Neo Arcadia.

Closing his eyes, he linked into the net, automatically cloaking his presence even before he attempted to log in. Almost immediately, a small window popped up, asking for his access codes. Now that the progenitor was gone, likely returned to the Resistance base, it meant that Master Zero was no longer asserting his control over the net. If, by whatever luck he had, Phantom was allowed back on the net, he would not suffer a repeat of the earlier attack that had, as Fefnir put it, 'locked him out of his house'.

Shock fired through him as his access codes were accepted, but that was soon replaced by calculation, by planning, by finding his exit point and developing the cover to the point that both Neo Arcadia and the Resistance would trust him.

Idly, Phantom worried for the remainder of the Zan'ei army should he ever be found out. If their commander had become a Maverick, had joined the insurgency that sought to ruin the iron-fisted control that Master X's insidious doppelganger had over the once-proud city…

There would certainly be fewer bodies demanding power from the city's plant, Phantom mused humorlessly.

Linking into the satellite network, Phantom input the coordinates he'd gotten and waited for a reply from the system. He had to be careful, however—too long connected to any satellite and he risked blowing his cover, even with his signal on the network masked as it was. The satellites were not as easy to shield from the security network, not as easy to access without drawing attention that they were being used.

He'd found the location easily enough; the image from the satellite was saved to his processor and he disconnected from the network. While a closer view would have helped, Phantom would at least be able to zoom in and enhance the image on his own time, connected to the city network or not. If there was something out there, something still above the surface of the desert that covered the once-green planet, he would find it.

From there, all he had to do was convince the Judges and that facsimile of his father that he was going _deep_ undercover to root out the Resistance.

He had no problem feigning allegiance to the city if it reunited him with his true family.

If things went well, perhaps his siblings would join him by the end...

* * *

><p>He really should have instructed the mechaniloids to fashion a bag of sorts to store the parts in for transportation, Blues mused. That red insignia was only on one side of the box—the top—and after doing some digging around, he discovered that it was indeed the seal of Neo Arcadia, tinged crimson to denote its origins in the manufacturing district. Blues figured that any Resistance members wouldn't take too kindly to the parcel, especially if they thought that the city willingly gave him the parts (as though<em> they'd<em> take the time and effort to care for others) rather than him actually, well, _stealing_ them.

At any rate, it'd be another hour before Blues could expect the halls to have real traffic, so he dismissed the Hoppiders, directing them to return home and charge, and headed down to the sixth level straightaway. He held the box with the lid (and insignia) pressed against his torso. He was listening to the communications and security networks very intently, watching for any unexpected developments. The comm network was amazingly silent with most of the Reploids sleeping. X wasn't online either, but that meant that he was potentially wandering around the base. Blues thought it far more likely that he'd gone wherever it was he went to rest and recharge.

He needed to ask X about the form he took, whether there was a classification for it, and whether it was related to that dear little thing that the human girl killed unnecessarily to wake Zero.

His door slid open for him when he was still approaching. Rock laid untouched; no one would have gotten in here anyway, and the door slid shut behind him. Safely back with…almost an hour to spare. He debated starting on Rock right now, but decided against it. He might start getting visitors once the base began waking, and X would almost certainly be dropping by again. So Blues placed the box on the floor and slid it under the bed, back against the wall where the blanket would partially obscure it. He'd have the mechaniloids come after the parts were all used to disassemble and destroy the box.

Finally in a (relatively) safe place, where he could drop his guard (a little) and relax (some), Blues sank down into his chair and rubbed his forehead with one hand, eyes closing in an exhausted gesture. System alerts popped up in his mind's eye, familiar flashing red alerts, warning him of his pain levels, of his strain, and of his core's status. What was new about that? He dismissed them all. But, still.

He wasn't feeling well.


	8. Demanding Answers

_So now we both have signed copies of both albums by the Protomen and we got hugs from Panther, Commander, Ringo, and The Gambler. I am so happy. We hope that you enjoyed our surprise update on Saturday, too._

_ And here we continue in the Resistance Base. Ciel needs to adhere to a real sleep schedule, Zero unlocks a memory involving cake, and we find out why, exactly, Blues wasn't feeling so hot last time. _

* * *

><p>Ciel was still wiping her eyes when she walked into Cerveau's lab, her slow, uneven steps telling Milan she'd barely gotten out of bed. Her clothes were fresh; that much he could tell by the general lack of wrinkles in them, but if she was still looking this haggard twenty minutes from now, he was going to suggest she take a shower. Co-commander of the Resistance or not, she had a bad habit of not really looking after herself as well as she should be.<p>

As he pushed himself out of his pod and closed down the diagnostics window that had been open for the last few minutes, Milan idly wondered if she'd just spent the whole night up and was working off of energy supplements and sheer willpower.

If she were, she'd be catching it from Cerveau in a few minutes. Whenever he was done doing…whatever he was doing.

Ciel rubbed at her eyes once more before dropping into one of the chairs near the charger pods. "Morning, everyone," she muttered.

Cerveau came back into the main lab room, carrying a tool kit from one of the back rooms; he'd been cleaning and sharpening them. He'd gotten out of his pod only ten minutes before Milan, but he was already setting into his itinerary for the day. He paused when he caught sight of Ciel, frowning slightly. "Did you sleep at all?"

Ciel groaned a little as she looked at the medical officer. "Sort of," she answered, still too out of it to try and cover up the fact that she'd fallen asleep at her computer terminal the night before. "I got about two and a half hours," she admitted.

That wouldn't sound at all bad to a Reploid, except that Cerveau knew that humans needed a full, uninterrupted sleep cycle to stay healthy. Interrupting a Reploid's rest period wasn't as bad; they could catch up later. Humans didn't really 'catch up' on sleep. It was all or nothing. "Two and a half? Ciel, you need to make more time for yourself. You'll get sick if you don't sleep." And it took humans _forever_ to recover from illnesses. Sometimes, it was worse than a physical injury.

"I know, Cerveau," she said, though her eyes had widened a bit at the fact that the Reploid had only used her name when addressing her. Something told her she'd best keep this short and get to bed—her actual bed—before Cerveau decided it was easier to drop sleeping pills into her food. "I got caught up in my work."

Milan couldn't help but look at the girl with some odd mix of concern and disapproval. This wasn't the first time that she'd kept herself awake until she collapsed, nor was it the last time she'd try to simply blow it off like nothing had happened. "Ciel, Master X should be back soon, so there's nothing wrong with you going and getting some well-deserved rest. You had a busy night, what with the raid and everything that happened. You really should be getting some sleep." At this point, the shower wasn't going to do anything but wake her up, and that would just exacerbate the issue. "Go on, Ciel."

The girl shook her head, though the motion was as slow as the rest of her movements had been. "I know I probably look tired, but…there's too much going on in my head right now for me to sleep."

And now Master X would be worried about her after one glance. Cerveau nodded slowly: sometimes letting her be awake for a while, letting her try to function, would just make her sleepier and she'd go and get a full sleep cycle after that. So once she started getting less alert again, he'd encourage her to try sleeping again. She just needed to be kept away from anything sharp or potentially dangerous in the interim. "Did you make any progress in the assignment Master X gave you?"

"Some," Ciel answered. "Nothing worth reporting yet, though, since I need more time and more Energen Crystals for the Nurse Elves since they can only activate their abilities for so long before they risk…" Ciel hated talking about the main reasons Cyber Elves in Neo Arcadia died, forced to use their abilities until even the Energen Crystal that their data was encoded into burned out. That was what truly destroyed them, since they could store the energy of crystals that they ate and use it as necessary. When they pushed themselves to the point that they started using the energy of their core crystal…

Ciel had to hold back tears at the thought of what had happened to Passy the night before, thankful when Milan drew a second chair near her so that he could sit down and hug her. "I'm sorry, it's just…between last night with finding Zero and…and that Neo Arcadian." Ciel visibly shuddered. "Something about him just…he's not right, somehow."

"Neo Arcadian…do you mean Master X's guest?" That in itself was…the gossip chain on the network was already thrumming and it hadn't even been twelve hours yet. Cerveau was curious too, of course. He hadn't come by for an examination, so he must be in good repair, but for Master X to bring someone randomly back, then have them treated as a _guest?_

Ciel nodded. "That had my brain running circles around itself for hours. Aside from Master Zero, _no one_ that X has brought back to the base has been treated that way. I don't recognize him, but with the size of the city, I'm not necessarily surprised that I never stumbled across him."

Milan shrugged, still holding Ciel despite the turn in conversation, although he opted to simply let one arm wrap around her shoulders. "I actually have to agree with Ciel's assessment there. He's an extremely odd one. I'm not going to even try to guess at his operational history, but he's…his clothing seems so…so _dated_."

"Wait," Ciel said, exhaustion not getting in the way of catching _that_ little detail. "Operational history? He's a Reploid?"

Cerveau stared at her. Perhaps he should push more sleep on her. She hadn't noticed? "Yes, he is. You didn't know?" The unit was strange, no matter what direction you approached it from. He was withdrawn and seemed incredibly private, Master X was treating him specially, treating him with the same care that he was treating _Master Zero,_ and hadn't been incredibly forthcoming on why, even if really, was it their place to press him about it?

Ciel shook her head. "Not in the least. That…that does explain how he was able to…" Ciel realized the kind of information that was being bounced around between X and the unknown Reploid, the familiarity with which X was addressing him, as if they had been friends. "If…what was his name?"

"Blues," Milan provided. "Ciel, if you didn't catch that last night…"

"I probably did, since it sounds familiar, but…so much of that was such a blur, what with the Pantheons and all the gunfire and…" She stopped again. "If Blues is as old as X and Zero," she asked, "why hasn't X mentioned this to anyone yet?" She was seriously starting to wonder if she should be adding the Master appellation to the two Reploids that had arrived at the base the previous night, seeing as she only dropped the title from X's name because he viewed her as their second Commander rather than a second-in-command.

A knock against the doorway cut their conversation off, Rocinolle sticking her head in. "Hey, good morning, everyone! Cerveau, I brought the parts you requested." She leaned back out, turning around to face something down the hall. "Erin! Kera!" she called out, "come on, we've got a lot of work to do and I want to get a good start before Master Blues shows up!"

A moment later, two Hoppider units moved into the room, each carrying a small box of various parts.

Cerveau stopped cold when the Hoppider units entered the room. His eyes widened: they were…he'd never seen a Hoppider unit move so naturally, not even the undamaged, uncorrupted ones in Neo Arcadia. They were moving like…_like real spiders._ They were quicker on their feet and far more agile. And they were carrying the boxes like it was nothing, and Rocinolle was coming in here with them like that like it was just a normal thing. "The…_how_ did you fix them?"

"Huh?" Rocinolle looked at the Hoppiders for a moment. "Oh, that!" She laughed softly. "That wasn't me at first, though Master Blues did show me what I had to do to fix it."

Ciel couldn't get past the fact that Rocinolle was calling the newcomer _Master_ Blues. Sure, Dande had been calling him 'Blues-dono', from what she'd heard on the way to her room, but for Rocinolle to use that? Dande was one of those units that dropped Japanese honorifics on every new individual in the base until they'd told him to stop, and to this day, Faucon and Hirondelle still occasionally got greeted with -sama tacked on the end. And it hadn't even been a full day since he'd arrived from Neo Arcadia with them! "Wait, what?"

Rocinolle stopped at this. "What what?" she asked.

Both whats, Cerveau wanted to say, but instead, he clarified, "_Master_ Blues? And he could fix the Hoppiders? In such a short span of time?" When had he had the time? He'd only just gotten here, he'd barely have had time to settle in. Cerveau certainly hadn't felt him on the network, he hadn't even really introduced himself around the base. He wasn't known at all, and he'd been permitted to tinker with the mechaniloids?

Oh, that! "Honestly, once he makes it to the lab today, I'm going to ask him if he prefers Master or Sensei, considering. That guy's a genius coder. Didn't anyone tell you?" From the looks on the three faces before her, Rocinolle hazarded a no. "Master Blues is an old friend of Master X's, emphasis on the old part. He's one of the earliest program coders brought into Neo Arcadia. As for fixing them, Erin went missing for a few hours after the raid. Turned out Master Blues was working on him, getting him back up to…actually, up past spec, seeing as even Neo Arcadia couldn't get them working this well." The Hoppiders had delivered their boxes and had started nuzzling against Rocinolle's legs, the Reploid bending down to pet them both. "C'mon, you two, we've got a lot more work to do! Get back to the lab and start setting out parts for the Condoroids so we can get them back on their wings."

The Hoppiders twittered for a moment before scampering down the hallway towards the access ladder.

Cerveau frowned. That was… "A coder like that, and they just _let_ him walk out?" Someone who was honestly good at it was someone Neo Arcadia could use. But, if he was an old friend of Master X's…well, that did explain the special treatment, but why hadn't Master X tried to extract him sooner?

Rocinolle shrugged. "With things the way they've been, there's probably a good reason he left. At this point, it's like you _sneeze_ and, if Copy X hears it, you're risking getting marked as Mav." She looked down the hallway after the Hoppiders. "Master X!" she exclaimed. The Cyber Elf had not been there a moment ago.

"Rocinolle, have you seen Ciel? She's not in her room and I know she shouldn't be awake yet."

The mechanic idly thumbed towards Cerveau's lab. "In there with the doc and Milan. If you'll excuse me, I need to get downstairs and back to work before Master Blues gets to the lab and wonders why I'm not busy fixing the Condoroid's coding. I just hope I got it right this time. They're a whole different story being airborne units."

X waved Rocinolle on, letting her get back to her work, although the question was there as to why his brother wasn't already awake and in the lab. He should have finished his sleep cycle, even if his ran a little longer than X's had. "Ciel," he said, sounding more like a father than a commander, "why aren't you still in bed?" He stopped at the doorway, looking at the girl's bedraggled appearance. "Oh, for the love of…Ciel, did you even _bother_ going to sleep?"

Ciel nodded, this time failing to voice an answer as to how long she'd slept. She had no intentions of bringing it up with anyone that she hadn't made it to the bed.

"Not for an entire sleep cycle," Cerveau interjected, frowning at Ciel. Really, was sleep so bad? Didn't humans enjoy it?

"Ciel," X said, pressing his forefinger and thumb against the bridge of his nose. "I don't care what excuse you want to toss around right now about not being tired or having better things to do or that the Resistance needs you up and about at the same time as everyone else. You were part of a raid last night, part of a very important operation. You were shot at. You were chased. For all I know, your adrenaline levels are still higher than they should be because you're not allowing yourself time to actually rest." He looked to the Reploid still holding one arm around the girl. "Milan, escort Ciel to her room, ensure that she actually lies down _in her bed_, and I'm assigning you to guard duty. She is not to leave that room until she has entered and completed an eight-hour sleep cycle."

Milan dutifully got to his feet, helping Ciel to hers and guiding her out of the room. "C'mon, Ciel, you know Master X is right about this. You need your sleep. The Resistance needs you," he assured her, "but they need you functioning and healthy. You're not like us. Four to six hours does not a healthy human commander make."

Ciel only nodded as the Reploid continued down the hall before heading for the lift and Ciel's room on the second level.

"Thank you," Cerveau sighed: sometimes, Master X was the only person Ciel would take direction from. "She wants to do her best, but she doesn't think about what she's doing so much of the time. She doesn't think in the long-term."

"She carries a lot more on her shoulders than she needs to or is responsible for," X agreed. "I can't truly fault her, though. She's not the only one that tries to ignore their limitations and keep pushing on for the sake of the Resistance." A small smile at that. "Although I have my own reasons, too," he admitted.

"You at least rest when you need to." X didn't let his health fail, kept himself in good condition. "We all…are trying to do a lot," trying to do a lot with so few people, so it was understandable that people got worn down, that people were overtasked. Cerveau really couldn't help Master X with his health, not when he didn't have a physical body, but he did look after the rest. "I saw the Hoppiders," and he still couldn't believe how much of an improvement was made to them, "and speaking of having your own reasons for things, there's been a lot of chatter on the comm network about that honored guest you brought back from Neo Arcadia."

"What of Blues? I...I've been keeping off the network for the most part, so I've probably missed a lot of what's going on. Something come up that I should be made aware of?"

"They'd watch their mouths the second you logged in anyway," Cerveau said. "You brought an unknown Reploid back from Neo Arcadia, requested that he be treated as your guest when no one has any idea who he is, though Rocinolle came in earlier and told us he was a coder." Cerveau looked back to X: that wasn't all, was it?  
>X didn't let the worry and panic show; now would be a terrible time for him to let his defensiveness about his brother falter. "He's a coder, yes. I don't get what's so upsetting about that." Was there something that X hadn't noticed, something about Blues that made the story seem fabricated? Despite the fact that it was, it worked well with his abilities and the lack of title when he addressed X. "Or is this all idle banter because I haven't talked of him the same as I have of Zero?"<p>

"Yes; no one's heard of him before. You surprised us, X, we weren't expecting two units, and for both of them to be close to you, but we've only ever heard of one of them?" So naturally, there was chatter. Cerveau was watching X carefully; he was unsure of what to make of Blues himself. He'd been so standoffish when he'd been in the lab, and he hadn't stayed very long, had he?  
>"I didn't talk about him for a few reasons. One would be that I hadn't seen him in years. After a while, I lost contact with a lot of the team that helped me with the city. Two would be the fact that Copy X has taken to finding inventive new ways to skew the definition of Maverick to meet his own ends, so I thought that most of the older models had been retired already. We barely managed to get Andrew out of the city when he refused to acknowledge that his marriage had been nullified and he was not allowed access to his wife's grave because she wasn't Reploid. What's to say that any of my friends survived? Zero, on the other hand, is both a legend and was seen as lost to the sands of time. You were here early on, when I used to sit down with Alouette and tell her stories of the Maverick Hunters. You knew that I didn't think he was gone, knew that we could still find him." Now, with plans to take the city back by force once the power system was ready? He had needed a warrior, and that was exactly what Zero was.<p>

"They'll be disappointed that their gossip chain's been so thoroughly smashed," Cerveau said with a slight smile and shake of his head. Master X was right: the chances that Blues survived this long in Neo Arcadia without being retired? Were next to nothing. "A coder, though, and by the Hoppiders, a _good_ one." Not just good. _Good._ "Neo Arcadia may be wanting him back."  
>"They may eventually," X agreed, "but he was on the run because he'd been charged." X honestly hoped Cerveau didn't see through him now, flying by the seat of his robes as he was. "He tried to file for a change of assignment from what he told me last night. Wanted to move out of Pantheon coding and got charged with being too 'independent' a unit."<p>

Cerveau's face became grim and he nodded, though there was a part of him that was…it shouldn't feel strange, that was such a common story, but… He shook it off; there was no reason for him to feel paranoid about it. He was just being influenced by the chatter over the comm, by Ciel being so unsettled by him. "I heard that those retirement orders are being issued with more and more frequency. He's lucky he got out, and so are we."

"Incredibly lucky," X agreed. He was thankful that Cerveau had taken the story at face value. As much as X hated lying or deceiving the members of the Resistance, keeping Blues' true identity was a matter of far greater importance. He'd have to head downstairs and talk to his brother, make sure that they had matching stories. The last thing they needed right now was someone noticing an inconsistency in this farce they had going on and deciding they were in the mood to pry. "Please make sure that Milan brings Ciel back here after she wakes up. I don't want to take any chances with her health at the moment, so if you wouldn't mind performing a routine check-up?"

"Of course," Cerveau nodded. Ciel's health was a constant concern to the medic since humans could get sick very easily and very quickly. It was amazing how quickly their health could deteriorate, though the fact that she was the only human here...well, it helped in the sense that there weren't any other humans here to get her sick, but it hurt her immune system because it wasn't being exposed to anything. So when she did get to be around her own kind, she often caught a cold or something.

X bowed his head before stepping out of the room, heading for the sixth level. It was odd, he realized, that neither Zero nor Blues were up and about yet today.

* * *

><p>Zero was still in his pod, though the charger cables had long since been pulled from his ports. Obsidian eyes stared blankly forward, barely seeing the wall ahead of him, lost in the memory file that had been repaired sometime in the course of the night.<p>

Memories of a cheerful redheaded human clerk behind the counter of a pastry shop, handing him back a small silver cred-stick and letting him know that there had been an additional charge because the order was for a Reploid.

He had told her that it was fine; he was aware of the luxury charge tacked on to Reploid food orders.

She'd gone into the back of the store, returning a moment later with a small, square box, the name 'Zero' scrawled on top with a black marker. She'd double-checked the item inside to make sure everything matched the order sheet and pushed the box across the counter to him, wishing him a good day and to pass on her own congratulations.

A world of soft blues skies soaring over towering buildings and lush green landscapes greeted him as he exited the building, a group of children, some human, some Reploid, darted across the sidewalk, more than a couple turning to look at him as if they'd recognized him. He'd balanced the box in one hand, the other drawing a single finger to his lips, smiling as the young ones recognized the signal for silence. Just because he was someone they looked up to didn't mean that he was bigger than them or wanted to be lavished with attention.

Besides, he had somewhere to be. Wireless signal linked into the nearby cab relay, requesting a single-passenger vehicle, and within moments, he was moving through the city towards the tower standing proud and tall in the northern district.

Maverick Hunter Headquarters, he recalled.

Sighing, the memory continuing to play out, he saw a multitude of faces, though only two registered with identification tags. The first was that of an imposing figure, clad almost head-to-toe in navy blue and gray armor, his stature commanding all the respect due to someone in his position. The second was a cheerful brunet wearing blue armor and matching helmet adorned with a glistening red gem, looking as if he'd just completed a marathon.

Hunter Commander Signas and X, as he had been long years ago, fresh out of his Class rank testing.

The cake in the box had been small, circular, only truly enough for a few close friends to share. That had been the intention anyway. The image on the cake was of a small yellow diamond nestled in the notch of a red V-shape, borne over two blue wing-like arches, the sugary lettering along the edge of the cake reading 'Congratulations, Class SA Hunter X!'

Zero held back a stuttering sigh as tears budded in the corners of his eyes.

A knock on the door broke him from his thoughts, the android quickly moving to his feet and opening the door.

"Hey, Zero."

The blonde stepped closer, careful not to pass through X as he embraced the Cyber Elf. "Congratulations on your promotion, Lieutenant Commander X. You have no idea how long Commander Signas and I have been waiting to see you pass these tests."

X pulled away, surprise etched on his features even as he passed clean through Zero's embrace. A hand reached up, touched the side of the Reploid's face, the loose blonde locks shifting a little at the contact, and X smiled. "Something came back last night?"

"Getting the cake for your Class SA promotion," Zero responded. "I haven't…I haven't seen Commander Signas around here since I woke up, so part of me is wondering if you've taken one more step up the ladder than I did."

X shook his head. "The Hunters were disbanded shortly after the Elf Wars ended about a hundred years ago. You…" X stopped for a moment, brushing his hands over Zero's hair again, still wondering what was so special about it that even a night hanging lose hadn't tangled the locks. "You don't have to worry about whether or not I got a promotion. You still outrank me since you served as a Unit Commander for longer than me before the disbanding."

"Unit Commander?" That wasn't something he recalled. "Well, I guess I only got one memory back for now." He smirked. "I can't complain. The memory had cake in it."

X laughed. "Well, if you're feeling alright, you want to look around the base, see if you can help out with something? I know your memory recovery is priority, but if they're restoring as slow as this one did, it'll take some time, and the Resistance needs every hand it can get."

"Well, I'll probably stop by Cerveau if he isn't busy. I want to start talking to him and that assistant of his I still haven't met about getting a few new weapons set up. This lack of weapons for all my protocols is annoying."

"Alright," X said. "I'll stop by later, see how things are going."

As X walked further down the hall, Zero couldn't help but wonder why X had been so evasive about explaining where Commander Signas actually _was._ It didn't help the situation any when he realized that none of the faces he'd seen in his memory file were present here. Shrugging, he figured he could ask about it later.

* * *

><p>Blues sat for a long time, bent almost double over in his chair, one hand supporting his head, pressed to his forehead, as the other gripped the armrest. His programming was set up for him to display human signs of distress when he was unwell—rapid breathing, pale complexion, tremors—so that any humans working with the Robot Masters would be able to tell when they weren't well.<p>

It'd have been handy for viruses or for any who didn't defrag and clean their minds up often enough, but for this condition? There was no curing it, no escaping it. Doctor Wily did his damndest to circumvent the condition, to get Blues' systems to acclimate to the programming, to not view the newer patches as something grating against his core directive set. It'd helped at first, but the new core that allowed Blues' continued existence brought on a whole new layer of agony over his systems.

Doctor Light had wanted a chance to look at him, to try to fix it, but the very idea of it, the mere thought of it, sent a feeling equivalent to nausea slamming through the robot's systems. Even now, with Doctor Light long dead and gone, the thought of the roboticist in that regard set him into a state of alarm, launched defensive protocols.

Blues had to manually shut them all down, one by one.

It took a long time, but sitting still and lowering his power usage, lowering the stress on his core, was really all he could do to coax his systems into some semblance of being green, all he could do to calm his volatile core.

Duo had been amazed that Blues could even _stand,_ let alone function, with this thing in him.

Blues began forcing his oxygen intake to a more normal, calmed pace, though he still had to take deep breaths: his respiration provided oxygen to his systems and vented excess heat. And he was a bit overheated now.

And damn it, he was running late now. He needed to think of a viable excuse.

His breath hitched as another wave of pain resonated through his body and he trembled.

He knew that if Rocinolle didn't come looking for him, X would the second the android realized that Blues was running late. He had a feeling that X still couldn't quite believe that someone as old as Blues yet lived, was half expecting him to disappear again, and so, would be worrying over him, keeping an eye on him.

The way Rock often did whenever Blues showed up during the wars to lend a hand.  
>X waited a moment before signaling for the door to chime. He honestly hoped he wasn't waking his brother. After all he'd likely been through in that city…<p>

He suddenly felt _very_ guilty for rushing here.

Shit. Blues' head rose, even as another tremor shook him. He glanced over at Rock, making sure he was secure even though Blues already knew that he was. He knew without even having to ask that it was X on the other side of the door: the push that caused the door to ring felt like the android.

He took a moment to consider: he couldn't ignore that chime. Shut off some of his displays? No, that'd put undue stress on his systems and as he was now, it'd accelerate the attack. _'Well,'_ he thought bitterly_, 'X may as well know now.'_ As opposed to him finding out when, say, Blues collapsed in a public place, like a lab. He straightened in the chair as much as he could, and then signaled the door to open, inwardly bracing himself for…he wasn't even sure what the android would make of this.

It didn't take X long to realize that something was severely wrong with his brother. Walking in as soon as the door opened, he immediately noticed the rigidity in Blues' stature, the way one hand was nearly crushing the armrest, the unsteady way his breath was hitching out of his body. "Blues," he asked, panic only touching on the fringes of his voice, "what's wrong?" Striding towards the elder Light sibling, X's halo, normally radiating a soft rainbow of colored light, stopped on red, the soft, muted color almost pink, and one of X's eyes slipped out of focus.

Blues didn't respond—he didn't trust his vocals right now and he had other things to be concerned about: a fresh wave of pain radiated from his core and he nearly doubled over again, his systems displaying red warnings and a countdown to shut down appeared in his mind's eye.

He vehemently canceled it. He knew that if he shut down now, he'd wake up on a lab table.

The scan wasn't as deep as a medical technician's would have been, but as X's gaze continued flitting along his brother's body, he couldn't believe the amount of pain registers that were near to being off the charts. Window after window was opening with new registers, new system issues, a plethora of data about everything that was _wrong_ with Light's eldest son. It didn't take long for the status screens to start showing just how many of the robot's display systems were in standby or hibernation, including a group of his emotional displays.

When his brother leaned forward, X locked onto the wave of pain, focused on the signal, and realized…

_What the hell did Doctor Light install in him for a power source?_

Rushing forward, hands already glowing with a faint pinkish-white light, X pressed his hands against Blues' chest. Whatever it was that was powering his brother, that thing was _volatile_, and that was being nice about it. The way his systems registered it in scan, X could only compare it to the fruits that evolved natural defenses to avoid being lunch for native animals.

Blues' power source was covered with spikes, each one sending shockwaves of pain to different parts of his body.

Pulsing the soft glow into his brother, now in fully-activated Nurse Elf mode, X attempted to cocoon the power source. It wouldn't cut it off, no, but it would lessen the surges that were tearing his brother apart from the inside out.

Blues was startled by the reddish-glow from X's power and he actually flinched back, actually _recoiled_ some, not that he had anywhere to run to; he was barely able to keep himself sitting (somewhat) upright. He might be able to stand, but walking? Forget running. He wasn't going anywhere as he was right now. After a moment, Blues realized that whatever energy X had pulsed into him was actually calming his core some, wasn't exacerbating the problem. It wasn't so much fixing anything as it was keeping the core from biting so hard into Blues' systems, alleviating the pain so that it wouldn't be so agonizing until the episode passed.

Blues would have leaned into X's shoulder had he been a solid, palpable person. Instead, he forced himself to sit on his own strength, his breathing becoming less ragged even as his systems alerts popped up about this strange energy, warning him of a possible attack.

Blues shut down the defensive system that was trying to target X as a hostile unit and registered the energy as something probably-benign. It became easier to think once his defensive protocols calmed down, though he didn't shut them down completely. Not one aspect of his defensive programming was truly dormant.

"It's benign," X assured. "Right now, I'm doing something akin to what Status Nurse Elves do in the field when someone takes a critical hit. This isn't going to work as a permanent solution, but for now, it'll keep the pain registers from overloading by putting a capacitor field over whatever's generating the signals in the first place." He sighed, pushing harder, the tines of whatever this was inside his brother trying to break through, pushing against the shield X was trying to build. "Have you been doing this the whole time you've been here? I can't even keep track of how many of your system displays are showing that you've shut them down or are ignoring them. And what the hell was that cancellation for the shutdown order?" He shook his head, the motion serving as a physical effort that shunted the windows popping up over his vision off to the side. He could address the alert list later. Right now, he had to get his brother back into the green.

Blues had quieted a great deal, was focusing on sorting through the plethora of error messages, warnings, and status messages. He glanced casually over them all with a familiarity that was alarming—critical messages like this should be _rare_—and acknowledged or ignored them, depending on how he wanted his systems to react. He knew that X was scanning him, knew that he could read Blues' status and part of him was immensely irritated by it. His breathing had normalized, though his face was still pale as death. He didn't respond to any of X's queries even though he was calm enough to actually answer now.

X sighed, pulling away as the core finally settled, finally stopped trying to shatter the shield, and X glared at Blues as he pushed himself to his feet. "So," X said, his voice laced with anger, "are you just refusing to answer me because I'm the baby of the family and you're _so_ much older than I am and 'you don't have to answer to a younger model', or did you act this way around Rock as well, refuse to trust _any_ of your family over something you won't let anyone know about?"

Blues tensed considerably at the mention of Rock's name, and his eyes narrowed behind his sunglasses. He was wobbly on his feet still, but forced himself to stand straight to address X. "Rock had more than enough on his plate to worry about. _You_ have more than enough to worry about. _This_," Blues motioned toward his chest, "is something I must live with. There is nothing to be done about it." So no, Blues didn't see it as necessary to worry others over it, especially when it wasn't something that could be repaired. He was broken from the day he was turned on, incomplete and insufficient from day one. There was no need to burden X with it.

X's entire aura shifted to a bright blue, his halo and eyes turning a deep azure, and his energy lanced out, Hacker controls linking into the shield around Blues' core and placing a stasis lock on the barrier. Until Blues had some sense screamed into his head and started actually letting his brother in, he wasn't going _anywhere_.

"You are _not_ about to walk away from me, Blues. You are not about to walk away from this. Not until _I have some goddamn answers!_ You say that I have enough on my plate, say that it's nothing that anyone but you should have to live with, but are you seeing this from anyone else's view? You were in Neo Arcadia! You were in my city, _my city_, and I never even knew! _You're my brother, for fuck's sake!_ I should have known, should have realized it before that my _family_ survived the hell that I lived through, the battles I fought! Do you know what this does to me, to know that _you're alive_ and that I missed it, that I couldn't even recognize my own brother until I _stumbled_ across you on the network a _century_ after I built that city, _a_ _hundred damn years_ after I shepherded the world to its last bastion of hope?

"You tell me that I'm supposed to care about myself, to take care of myself, to let people close because I need family, and look at you! You won't let me near you! You evade every question, disregard my concern, and _dare_ to tell me to just let it go? What _the hell_ crawled into your processor, Blues?" X was raging now, unable to ignore the double standards evident now, hypocrisy his brother had tried only the night before to mask as advice. "What the _fuck_ do you want me to do, ignore everything because you're older and _obviously_ know how to take care of yourself?" The sarcasm was nearly dripping from his lips at that last comment.

A plethora of defensive protocols came up in Blues' systems, his first impulse being to teleport out. That was vetoed before his systems even registered that his teleportation was still offline. Blues' body tensed and his firewalls tightened, his systems registering his body's vulnerable position. His systems returning the likelihood it projected of him being shut down and tampered with—why else would anyone want to immobilize a Robot Master? This was the single _most vulnerable_ position he could be in outside of being offline. A feeling of panic rose in him, a sickening panic that was all too familiar. He vetoed the impulse to bring up old memories, even as his body trembled.

To quiet his systems, to show that X wasn't actually poised to shut him down—and he hoped that he was right in that regard—Blues ran a scan on X, queried the android's status and well-being. It returned with X's emotional state, that X as easily as upset as Blues was, that Blues' refusal to open up was _hurting_ him. Another panicked tremor shook Blues' frame.

Blues sighed, though it really came out as a ragged breath. His voice was soft, almost pleading. "What do you want me to say? That I'll be fine, that this condition is easily reparable, that this is something that will pass, that can be _fixed?_ That I'm okay with it despite knowing what it does to my systems?" That Blues had wanted this wretched condition tacked onto his existence? "I've not lied to you, X. It was not your fault you didn't know I was there, wasn't something you could have known. I thought that facsimile was_ you_." And Blues would not have been inclined to introduce himself to X had that been the case. "I did not know where you were until you logged into the network. And even then, I wasn't certain it was you until I scanned you. I'd been _avoiding_ being seen."

His systems persisted, tried targeting X again, insisting that honestly, yes, the only thing this outside entity could want was to reprogram him. There was no other reason for restraining a Robot Master this way. He'd ignored this warning before and look at their condition now. He might not wake up again. He might wake up a prisoner in his own mind. This was not safe. Evacuate? Y/N?

N.

"I'm not good at this," Blues finally admitted. Family things. He wasn't good at them, wasn't good at letting people close. "There was a time when my systems wouldn't be in an uproar from you doing this, a time when it wouldn't have been…alarming. That time is long past."

X shuddered, his entire frame shaking, and the Cyber Elf's controls began to waver, loosening before falling away completely, and as his eyes refocused, returned to their normal emerald hue, as X fell to his knees. An anguished cry escaped his lips, and he internally cursed his inability to cry. "It's…it's not _fair_, Blues," X whimpered. "You're hurting, Zero doesn't remember _anything_ from our past, and all I can do is wait around, let this world slip closer to the point of no return, and pray that it doesn't get to that point before I can _make things right_." He hadn't missed Blues' questions, hadn't misunderstood what the robot meant by being 'not good at this'. "How can I begin to make this world right, fix everything that went wrong, when the two people that should matter the most to me right now _aren't right_? You…you…" X finally tore his eyes from the floor. "You're _hurting_, and badly. Whatever you're using as your core isn't…shouldn't _be doing this to you_. How can I just ignore that, think that I can't fix it? I'm a Cyber Elf! And I'm not like the others! I'm not restricted by classification or energy levels. I know that if I tried, if I just…if I knew what was wrong, knew the core problem, I could find a way to address it…"

X dropped his head into his hands, unable to effectively voice his frustrations, his anger, his disappointment at his own incompetence. "How can I pretend that I'll be able to fix everything else when I'm useless to my family, to the people I care about?"

"It's not a question of your competence, or mine, or anyone else's. It's not a question of not trying hard enough." Blues shifted and sat back down in the chair, feeling a bit ill still. "You're right, it's not fair, but it is what it is. Wily was…an excellent roboticist. He would not have left Zero to chance: I believe that the odds of him recovering most, if not all, of his memory files are quite high. As for me…it's not something that can be fixed. This is my baseline. As wrong as it is, as 'unfair' as it is, this is reality. It's already been looked into. Every possible avenue only makes things worse. So please, X, don't drive yourself into despair over it." Don't let it rip you up, don't let it hurt you so badly.

"He barely recovered his memories from his activation, only had passing visions of his creator…of Wily talking to him during his construction. How can you be so sure, Blues?" There was so much there, so very much that Zero _needed _to remember. "And you. _You_. How can you live with yourself, with the pain?" X was _still _sorting through the status alerts that had cropped up when he'd scanned Blues. "You push yourself day to day with this many systems, all these displays…your baseline shouldn't be like this. I…I tried to get everything back to green, back to normal, and your normal status condition is yellow to amber instead of green? How can you stand to operate like that? And how can it not be fixed? I mean, yes, sure, we don't have the greatest equipment here at the base, but…" it couldn't be irreparable. There was no way anyone was meant to exist as Blues seemed to let himself.

"What is your core made out of, anyway? When I was shielding it, trying to subdue the flares, it was like knives wrapped in razors and topped off with a bow made of needles. I've _never_ seen anyone's core like that, never seen something so dangerous." He looked up. "For all the work, all the care, that Doctor Light put into my creation, my development, what the _hell_ was he thinking when he built you? Hadn't he known the risks? Didn't he see how dangerous your core would be?" And that wasn't saying anything about the power readings his scans had registered, how much juice that thing was capable of producing.

"Ah—that's…" Blues tapered off, not certain what, exactly, to say to X about that. He didn't want X to know the truth, or at least any real detail, but he also knew that if he tried to feed him some falsehood, it wouldn't end well. Finally, Blues sighed. "I was the prototype model. The _prototype._ Do you understand what that means? You keep speaking of how things should have been for me, for everyone, but you must realize, despite your idealism, that wishing to change the past is futile. We can only impact the present to change the future. You called yourself a Cyber Elf several times now. What is that?"

X nodded. He _had_ mentioned as much to Blues before. "I think I told you a little about Cyber Elves with what I said about Mother Elf. Cyber Elves, at least originally, were derivative programs from Reploids, program fragments that were able to provide a unit with support in the field. As time went on, however, and the Elf Wars proved that derived programs were able to take over their parent units, we tried to find new ways to provide the support that the elves gave. Has anyone told you about Energen Crystals yet?"

"Only that that girl—Ciel—has been studying how Cyber Elves process them," and Blues really hadn't looked anything up. With each network separate, it was a bit more difficult to jump around and given that this was X's home, the home of family, Blues did have a sense of propriety in where he hacked. Like how he wasn't asserting control over the networks the way he'd done with Neo Arcadia.

X nodded as he pushed himself to his feet. "As the name would imply, they are crystals that have latent energy contained within them, though we're not exactly sure _how_ naturally-occurring crystals are able to do that. After a few years of research, we learned that we could actually implant coding into the crystals. Given time, the code manifests a personality matrix as well, which allows the Cyber Elf born from the crystal to pick its name and ability, since the coding is all base programming. Elves are then able to choose their ability or classification, either as Nurse, Hacker, or Animal. The initial crystals we provide them are meant to help them mature into full-fledged elf programs. Any crystals given after that are meant as fuel for their abilities, since using an undernourished Cyber Elf would draw their power directly from the core crystal. You can imagine the ramifications of doing that, so we provide extra crystals that their bodies can convert into potential energy." X stopped for a moment. "You can probably tell by the shift in abilities that I'm not the same as them, though I identify as one."

Blues paused, frowning slightly. Color was beginning to return to his face as his systems stabilized. If X thought the error messages he felt were bad…well, Blues could flip through them much more quickly. "Ciel offered one to an elf in the lab Zero was contained in," Blues' voice had an odd tremor to it, as though something happened down there upset him somehow, something he deeply disapproved of.

_Passy_, X realized, figuring the shift in Blues' voice had to do with what had happened to the Nurse Elf. He nodded, though he diverted the conversation away from the events in the lab. He could tell that it would only further upset his brother, and the last thing Blues needed was something else added to the sea of wrongness his systems seemed to be comprised of. "Do you remember when I mentioned that the scientists that researched Zero shunted his soul?"

"To move him into a second body." Blues nodded slightly.

"Similar effect happened to me when I connected into the system that we made to seal Dark Elf. I still haven't been able to figure out how, considering I hadn't been exposed to Energen Crystals or undergone any modifications that would have allowed me to use them. Best I can figure is that my DNA Soul, linked as it was for a moment with Dark Elf, managed to keep me from being permanently offlined. After the procedure, I found myself on a network I didn't recognize, one that I was completely alone in. Considering what I am is not focused around a core crystal, I need to return to that network every night to restore my own energy levels." X smirked, shaking his head. "I still haven't figured out how it works, to be honest, but aside from being able to manifest in this form in the physical world, I have the abilities of all three elf classifications that can be accessed at any time. What I did earlier to shield your core was part of my Status Nurse capabilities, while the…other thing was Hacker Override, a means of controlling external systems in Reploid units. Since I'm not entirely sure I could affect yours, I locked onto the shield I'd made." He sighed, his form flickering a little. "It expends a lot of energy, though, to do that, and just like a Cyber Elf that risks using the power of their core crystal, I can't push myself too hard. Too much energy spent in an effort, and I'm not sure what will happen to me."

Blues frowned, concern flickering across his eyes, not that X could see it. Blues' coloring was back to normal and had X not walked in during the attack earlier, he'd have no idea that Blues had been in such pain. The Robot Master wasn't alarmed by it, didn't even seemed worried by it. He acted as though this sort of pain was commonplace, that being debilitated so was something that happened, nothing more. It was likely that whatever network X described was one Blues didn't have access to: he couldn't sense it at all, even when X left for it.

He appreciated the gesture, appreciated X's attempt at healing, but Blues would much rather X conserve his energy for such a time that he needed it. "You'll need to rest, then," since his form was flickering after expending the effort to heal Blues, then lock him in place. But, from what he gathered, the Cyber Elf was…a manifestation of the Reploid's programming code, independent of a body. That was…it made him think of spirits, of what humans called ghosts. Except X wasn't creepy. "But even so, you need a body." It'd be safer for X that way and he'd probably be emotionally and psychologically more sound by having a physical body and being able to actually interact with people. He seemed like he would be huggy, the same way Rock had been.

"I explained the body thing to you before. I have one, and once the city is mine, ours, once again, I will find a way to heal Mother Elf of the curse and reclaim my physical form. I have no delusions about the city: the people will keep me on that pedestal, but at least this time, I will have a long-lost brother and an old friend at my side." X hadn't missed how quickly Blues' apparent condition had returned to normal, looking on the outside as if whatever had happened just moments before was barely a concern. His halo once more shifted to the gentle red as he scanned his brother.

He certainly looked healthy on the surface. Beneath it, however, under the scrutinizing eyes of a status scan?

X could not even begin to fathom how his brother was able to stand.

Blues couldn't help a slight smirk at X's apparent confidence. Not that there was anything wrong with it: so long as you were aiming, aim high. Even so, what he'd seen of the Resistance here was…there didn't seem to be a whole lot of members, likely for fear of Copy X. He looked up when X's halo changed back to that pink-red hue, but X didn't try to stabilize his core again, only scanned him again. He supposed that discovering that such a condition was his baseline would be shocking, would be hard to swallow.

He'd had trouble swallowing it at first himself.

Blues didn't bring his closed-off displays back online, left a great deal dormant still, even the ones he didn't normally bring offline. He rested for a few moments more, then tried standing again. He was much more stable now, wasn't unsteady on his feet, and the others in the base wouldn't know the difference. Just as he intended.

"Rocinolle will likely be waiting for you in the lab, so it would probably be in your best interests to come up with a good cover for why you're running behind. We may not run as tight as ship as the Maverick Hunters, but she'll take note." X's mind flickered to the conversation with Cerveau. "There's apparently been a lot of chatter on the comm network about you. A lot of the Resistance doesn't know what to think of you."

"I've heard them talking," Blues sounded…not amused by it, but not surprised, either. He was used to people not trusting him. "I'll tell her that…I stayed up later than I intended working on the coding sets for the Condoroids and so, my recharge cycle was pushed forward." That was believable, right? Much better than telling her or X the truth: that he'd spent his time raiding Neo Arcadia's manufacturing district for custom parts. Though really, his condition is what was making him run late. It was a shame that defragging had no impact whatsoever on his episodes.

"That's acceptable, although if she asks further, let her know that you had an extended recharge cycle to ensure a full charge," X commented. "I did have to come up with a bit more of an…elaboration for Cerveau. He…he pried, so I didn't have much of a choice without risking there being _more_ chatter on the net. I used the story I provided Rocinolle last night, that you're an old friend and coder from the city, but added that I hadn't talked about you as much as I had Zero because I wasn't even sure you were still alive, considering the state of the city. He also referred to your skills because he was thoroughly impressed with your work on the Hoppiders, said that Neo Arcadia might want you back because of your skill. I…assured him that it would require the city to rescind your retirement order, as you'd been deemed too 'independently-minded' for requesting a transfer away from Pantheon programming. It may sound a bit…recycled, in terms of why a retirement order was issued, but it's as good a cover I could come up with on such short notice."

Blues nodded his approval, "Common stories are best. That's simple enough and given the state of Neo Arcadia, easy to believe. And…it's not entirely untrue, either, is it?" X had thought Blues was dead, so there was truth in it. But now Blues could stay in the same vein as X and neither of them would contradict the other. And as for Neo Arcadia…well, they definitely wanted him back, though not for his skill. They hadn't even tried to restore Rock, didn't try to find out what their functions were.

X's form flickered again. "I…should return to Cyberspace. I can tell that my energy levels weren't that drastically affected, that I'm not in any danger, but it was…a tax on my system. I should be back shortly."

Blues hesitated, but nodded. "When you return, I'll give you the peripheral program and show you how to use it." X would need some guidance with it, Blues imagined, and some mock attacks to learn to wield it. Nothing so drastic as he'd done to Phantom when he entered Blues' network, but still enough to learn. "There's an…art to it. So get some rest." Because with him flickering like that, it was concerning to Blues.


	9. Just Dropping In

_Apologies for the late update: Midnyght and I both work retail, and 'tis the season for returns. Lots of returns. And for customers to waltz up to the register twenty minutes after close and expect service. Seriously people, go home._

_My little rant aside, here is the ninth installment of Redemption, in which Zero bumps into Blues and learns a very valuable life lesson. More directly, the life lesson that if you're going to be dropping in unexpectedly around a Robot Master with something in your hands, that something better have an apparent threat level no higher than that of a cuddly little bunny stuffie. Really. And even said stuffed animal might get you forcefully removed from the room. Um...whoops? Yes, we are terrible. Thank you._

_Mega Man is copyright Capcom, and the only profit we're making is how much fun this is being at writing._

* * *

><p>It was a quiet day at the base, Cerveau mused. They'd lost some units during the raid, but none of those that returned were seriously injured and with Ciel in bed, he had no patients today. So, instead, he was working on some of the weapons that'd been damaged in the raid. At the moment, he was working on a pistol not unlike the one Zero carried, though this one had a problem with jamming. He had it disassembled on his work table for what felt like the fiftieth time, but he couldn't see why it wasn't working properly. Now he'd resorted to changing parts out to see if one of them was faulty and he just wasn't <em>seeing<em> it.

"Doc?" Zero said, sticking his head into Cerveau's lab. "Need a hand with anything?"

"Master Zero," Cerveau greeted, waving the android into the lab. "Sure, if you have the time. I hope no one's been pestering you?" More than one member on the base was star-struck that ~Master Zero~ was amongst them. Cerveau didn't think that anyone would be pushy after the incident on the comm network. That'd been embarrassing enough for them to mind their manners for at least a week.

Zero walked into the lab, hair curtaining over his shoulders as he'd opted to forgo the helmet for the day. Not that that hadn't earned him his fair share of curious glances and overlong stares. "Awful quiet in here. Thought being a med officer, you'd be busier."

"It's busiest when everyone first gets back, but there were…a lot of deaths. The units that did return had very few injuries, so there wasn't a lot to do once that was finished up." He supposed it was a good thing that there was so little to do, though he'd have preferred that they bring the bodies back, even if that wasn't an option given the nature of the mission. Sneaking into Neo Arcadia was no small feat.

Black eyes diverted to the floor. "I…I hope they're not holding it against me for what happened to your troops last night," he said. "I mean, I know that there's not much I can do, but…" His gaze flickered towards the pieces splayed out on Cerveau's workbench. "Buster pistol?" he asked.

"Don't think that it's your fault. They understood what they were up against when they signed on for the mission. No one here would hold it against you, so don't hold it against yourself. Ah, and yes. Buster pistol. It keeps jamming. I've checked everything and I'm just not seeing the problem. Do you want to take a look? Fresh eyes do wonders." The parts were on a swath of that static-proof cloth and Cerveau pushed it a bit toward Zero as an invitation.

Zero grabbed a nearby chair, scooting it towards the workbench before dropping down, his chest pressed against the back of the seat. Leaning over, he looked over the parts. "Okay, so, pressure and acceleration rings, convergence ring, beam generator," he said, ticking off the list of parts in his head. "From the schematics X gave me, for this thing to be jamming without damaging the unit…" he drifted off for a moment, picking up the acceleration ring. "This thing only operates in short bursts, right? Accelerates only a fragment of the total stored energy in the gun?" Zero flipped it over in his hands. "Have you checked the internal wiring? If something shorted, wouldn't that affect the gun's ability to fire?" The magnetic field generator in his saber was similar, but when it came to the pistols, it wasn't a continuous stream of energy being fired out of the muzzle. Although designed as energy-based weapons, they worked very similar to the concept of a magnetic rail gun. Without a powerful enough magnetic field drawing the stored energy, the charge wouldn't be pulled out of the condenser ring at all.

Cerveau nodded, "I thought of that and tried putting in a new acceleration ring. It worked at first, but now it's jamming up again." Testing his fixes at the firing range _had_ been fun, though. "It's possible something burned it out, but I haven't been able to pinpoint what."

"Okay, so that's not it." Zero looked over the parts again. "If it were something in the pressure ring, this thing would be exploding when it jammed. I'm guessing you've already looked for cracks in the casings for all these parts?"

Cerveau nodded. "It's possible I missed something, but I've gone over them a dozen times already," and his tone implied that he was _sick of this pistol._

Zero twined his fingers before resting his head against the back of his hands, staring at the pieces. "Okay, so no cracks, nothing wrong with the power source, the acceleration and pressure rings are fine…" Zero picked up the condenser ring, noticing that the void in the middle was smaller than the pressure ring but larger than the one in the acceleration ring. Okay, so the energy wasn't just condensed at one point, it was systematically focused throughout the entire chamber. Picking up the spacers that belonged between each of the rings, he checked for cracks and, like Cerveau, found nothing. "I honestly don't know," he admitted after a moment. "The components individually look fine, but without having some way to monitor this while it's being fired…" He sighed, carefully placing the energy cell back on the cloth. "For all I know, the condenser ring's in backwards and the polarity issue is negating the pull from the acceleration ring."

Cerveau's eyes widened and he was quiet for a long moment, with a look like 'oh, damn it' crossing his face, then he slammed his head into the tabletop. Without lifting his head again, he groaned. The condenser ring. _The condenser ring._ In _backwards._ Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Zero carefully moved the few components near Cerveau's head back a bit. If the medic did that again, better he hit tabletop a second time instead of hitting pistol components. "Are you okay?"

"I'm…fine. It's just…never mind. Thank you, Master Zero." Cerveau finally straightened, looking slightly exasperated, but not with Zero. "I think…I know what's wrong with it is all." And now he felt really, really stupid. He gathered up the parts and began to reassemble them into the main body of the pistol. Well, at least he'd be done with this one for a while.

Silence stretched on for a moment, Zero watching the Reploid carefully reassemble the pistol, a small smirk cracking at the corner of his mouth when Cerveau actually double-checked the polarity of the condenser ring. As the last piece of the pistol's internals clicked into place, Zero looked up to the medic. "Cerveau, do you have any idea what happened to Commander Signas?"

Cerveau paused in his ministrations over the pistol, not out of shock or alarm, but out of confusion. He tilted his head slightly, as though he was trying to access something stored in his memory files. "Commander who?"

Zero blinked, taken aback by the Reploid's confusion. "Commander Signas," he repeated. "The Maverick Hunter High Commander. Tall guy, dark armor, really good strategist. I mean, I know X said it's been a hundred years, but I would have thought someone might know what happened to him."

Cerveau hesitated this time: this person was more than likely dead, but he wasn't going to be the one to tell Zero that. "I…I'm afraid that I haven't been activated for that long. I never met anyone by that name." Cerveau wasn't exactly a newbuilt either, but compared to Masters X and Zero? He was still in _diapers_, as humans put it.

The blonde shrugged. "I guess it's not all that important. I'm just a little stuck on why he seemed disappointed with me because I showed up at the butt end of X's rank test with cake."

…Rank test? Cake? Wait a minute! "You mean you've begun recovering memories?" Already? Cerveau's voice sounded surprised and a bit eager. This? Was a very, very good sign.

Zero nodded, then realized that he'd completely forgotten Cerveau's orders. "I am _so_ sorry, Cerveau, I'd completely forgotten about that." He frowned when he realized that he'd made a comment that didn't reflect kindly on his memory functions. "I…" he huffed, "it was just the one, though. I was getting a congratulatory cake for X because he was going through the Class SA test protocols that day and…well…unless Signas vacated his position, Lieutenant Commander was the highest we could go in terms of Hunter hierarchy." Zero frowned. Were those…related memory files? Data files? "Actually, I think I got a few satellite data files back when that one restored. I'm…wow, yeah, I got satellites. Hunter rank and paramilitary title guide, memos regarding changes to Unit Commander testing protocol, and…" Eyebrows furrowed. "Why would I have been looking through the…" He waved a hand. "Never mind."

"This is a _really_ good sign, Master Zero. It'd be far more worrisome if it took time for memories to begin to be restored. Will you keep a log of when and how the memories return? Whether something triggers them, whether they're during sleep cycles…" Cerveau trailed off as he turned to his terminal to log this. "If we can pinpoint when and how your files are being recovered, we may be able to apply it to others who've sustained processor damage. They say that for humans, their senses, especially smell, are connected to memory, but when they have damage…it's almost always a lost cause."

"For whatever it's worth, the main one, the one with all the sensory data, was restored during my sleep cycle. The other stuff, the document files and whatnot, are restoring randomly. Most of them just now when I was talking to you about the cake." Zero looked at his hands. "Which was double chocolate triple-layer cake with vanilla cream frosting."

"That sounds good," Cerveau said, even though he'd never had cake before. He'd heard from humans that it was a dessert and very sweet. Western-style, whatever that meant. But back to business: "So…sleep cycle. That makes sense, actually, that's when our minds are set to do maintenance and any restorations."

"Something tells me that spending my days sleeping won't work, though."

"No, that'd be a bad idea. It'd be best for you to being a normal operations schedule so your system doesn't think there are any stressors, then let it do its maintenance as programmed."

"You mentioned sensory triggers for humans," Zero noted. "Has anyone ever tested that theory for Reploids?"

"Well, smell would be a moot point for us," Cerveau said, "But it could theoretically work with hearing or sight, although it's not been extensively tested, no."

Shrugging, Zero reached over, grabbing the pistol and fitting the last few pieces together. "If you want, I can take this to…wherever in the facility you test-fire your weapons and go shoot targets." Perhaps getting back into old routines would help his memories come back.

Cerveau nodded in agreement: that may help. "The firing range is one level below us, past Rocinolle's lab." It was a fairly large room and Cerveau liked to go down there to blow off steam from time to time.

Zero nodded, holding the pistol at his side as he got to his feet, both leg holsters occupied by his own weapons. "How long should I test for?" he asked, feeling the heft of the weapon. Somewhat smaller than his own, the gun was still about the same weight. "Or am I just checking to see if it fires?"

"If it's firing properly, go ahead and practice," Cerveau smiled, "Have fun with it, but stay at least twenty minutes if all you want to do is evaluate the weapon."

Zero nodded, leaving the room and wandering down the hall until he found a ladder. As convenient as the lift may have been, there was something exhilarating about dropping from floor to floor. Turning a corner, he found one of the access points between the fourth and fifth levels of the base. With a soft chuckle, he dropped down the passageway.

He settled against the floor with a thud, landing in a crouch as his legs folded down to dampen the impact forces, the arm holding the pistol curling upward to keep the firearm from hitting the ground. His head snapped up immediately at the sound of a sharp inhalation, as if he had scared someone, and his eyes met with imposing black sunglasses.

Blues didn't even wait to see what Zero would do. He jumped back in a practiced motion, his body sliding into a very recognizable, very defensive position. He raised his left arm, using his right hand to steady it as it shifted and a buster encased his hand and forearm. His systems were screaming with alerts; Wily's android just snuck up behind him and was pointing a weapon at him, and Blues didn't have to think twice. A bright light focused in the chamber of the buster as he charged it once, then held the shot, his face expressionless save for his frown.

Memory files screamed awake in the rushed activation of his defense protocols, Zero _knowing_ that stance, for a moment seeing X where Blues was standing, seeing himself in a wasteland with his friend flanked by two medical drones, knowing before it had finished forming that X…_Blues_ was raising his buster. Legs uncoiled from his crouched position, sending the blonde in a reverse combat roll, pistol falling from one hand as the other grabbed the saber hilt from its sheath. Landing back on his feet, turning his body to the side to reduce the chance that something vital would be hit, the saber hilt came up in a tight reversed grip, blade snapping to life and angled to deflect any fire aimed at him. "Whoa, Blues!" he cried, free hand open, palm facing out. "Don't fire!"

A tremor ran through Blues' frame, as though the Reploid was arguing with himself, with his _programming_, even though no Reploid could be programmed with protocols that can challenge the unit's will. A few long moments passed, but Blues didn't fire or dissipate his charge. He grit his teeth, honestly torn between obeying the Third Law and blasting Zero's head off and listening to the part of him that argued that Zero was in a defensive stance, was holding a hand up, and was pleading with Blues to not open fire. His stress levels were already incredibly elevated and this just exacerbated it, and Blues realized that if this kept up, he'd have a second attack today.

If he did, his systems would override him and shut him down. Here, in this facility full of Reploids who had no idea what he was, no idea how his systems worked, that would want to open him up and try to fix him.

* * *

><p>Sentinella shot up in her chair, the security monitor spinning as her hands danced over the holographic controls. "Base alert!" she cried out, zooming the cameras. "We have weapons activation on Level Five outside of firing range, sensors picking up one ranged, one blade, and…" The security officer stopped, the amber eyes going wide behind her helmet. "Dande, get someone to find Master X. His 'honored guest' just drew a buster on Master Zero." She tapped another button on her control display, activating a direct link to the rooms where response team members were quartered. "Security team, alert, we have two units on Level Five with drawn weapons. Repeat, alert, we have two armed units on Level Five. Proceed with caution." What was this Reploid <em>thinking<em>, drawing a weapon on Master Zero? And since when did Neo Arcadian coders have armament?

'_Security, this is Faucon. I'm on Five now, reporting to site. Should I wait for backup?_' The Reploid already had his pistol drawn, having received the priority alert in the middle of target practice at the firing range. As he cleared the doorway, the alarms starting ringing through the corridor.

"Five more units are en route, Faucon, ETA seventy-five seconds." She spun her chair again, smacking the comm line controls. "Has anyone found Master X?"

A chorus of negatives rang out in reply.

"Of all the times for him to be unreachable…" Sentinella groaned.

Faucon turned the corner, coming down the hallway to find the Neo Arcadian programmer aiming…was that a buster cannon? _Dammit_, he swore, lowering his firearm as he approached, seeing Master Zero on one knee, saber blade raised as a shield, one hand up in a signal of surrender. _If he's not attacking, why is this unit not lowering his weapon_? "Blues-dono," Faucon called out, going with the safe bet of using the title Dande had, careful to keep his pistol low but ready, "Blues-dono, please lower your weapon. There's no need for violence, especially not against Master Zero."

The sound of booted feet echoed from the other end of the hall, somewhere behind Zero.

"I know you've dealt with a lot in Neo Arcadia," he assured, still trying to figure out why this particular unit was even battle-capable, "but Master Zero has nothing to do with that. Please, just lower your weapon."

As five more of the security team moved into the hall, Faucon quickly signaled for them to keep their weapons down.

"Blues, please!" Zero pleaded. "Don't fire! I'm sorry! I didn't mean to startle you!" Despite his words, the saber remained raised, held in front of his body to shield Zero from the blast if Blues fired. Behind his eyes, he was struggling to make sense of the memory file that refused to shut off. X, his friend, his partner…with buster raised and ready to fire. Zero had to keep himself from moving in response to the memory, wanting to dodge shots that were locked in files that belonged to a past he couldn't remember, save for these confusing, jumbled pieces.

X hadn't even fully emerged from the gateway when the scream of alarms met his ears, bolting through the hallways to the security station. Disregarding the mental health of the units on the other side of the door, X dashed through it, slowing to a stop in front of the monitor station. "What happened?"

Sentinella immediately recognized the voice. "Master X, we have a situation on Level Five. It seems that coder you brought in just drew a _buster_ on Master Zero." Despite the helmet, she leveled her gaze at the Cyber Elf. "What is going on in that city if a Pantheon programmer is armed?"

"I'll explain later," X said, pressing himself against the server in the room, dissolving into the unit and immediately darting for the fifth floor security bay. If he could just get there in time…

Blues did not need another upset today.

By the time he'd reformed on the fifth floor, X could already hear two voices over the clamor of the alarms. One he recognized as Faucon, desperately trying to get someone to lower their weapon. From what Sentinella had said, that meant Blues. The other…the other was Zero, pleading with the robot to lower his weapon , that he was sorry, that it was all an accident, he hadn't meant it…

Six units surrounded Zero and Blues. Faucon had gotten himself in an odd position, separated from the rest and behind Blues. All of them were armed. Looking to his brother, he could see the tenseness of his stance, the way his arm wavered despite his control, the pleading tone of his body language to _just leave me alone_.

"Stand down!" X ordered, moving to stand behind Zero. "Security team, stand down!" Even with their weapons lowered, they were probably still registering to Blues as threats, as just another stressor on an already taxed system. "I can get the situation under control," he said, three quick steps moving him between Blues and Zero. "Security team, I am ordering full withdrawal. Pull back now. Get back to your stations or your rooms. I will get this situation under control."

As the security members holstered their pistols and abandoned the hallway, X placed his hands, palms outward, signaling each to lower their weapons, their defenses.

He knew Zero would have to drop his first.

"Zero," he said, not turning towards either to ensure he kept an eye on both, "put the saber away. Please. Trust me on this." The hand facing Zero twitched, leaned toward the floor. "Switch the saber off, drop it, and step back with your hands in the air." Eyes flickered over towards Zero for a moment. "Unholster and drop your pistol too."

Zero did as he was told, stepping back from the items once they'd be settled on the floor, open hands in the air.

"Okay," X said, turning to face Blues. "C'mon, Blues, there's enough going on. Disengage."

After a long moment and another tremor, the nascent hot light in the barrel of Blues' buster faded, a soft, high-pitched sound accompanying the fading energy. Blues seemed to be struggling with something, with his systems, as another tremor shook him, as the Third Law tried to override him disengaging his buster, tried to keep him from allowing the situation to defuse. Had his teleporter been online, he'd just have returned to his room after Zero startled him, since leaving the situation was easier than just staying there and trying to ride it out when his programming was screaming at him to do otherwise. He forced himself to lower his arm, to deform the buster, even as a third tremor shook him, though the way he was shaking now was very different than the way he had been during the earlier episode X witnessed. A flurry of warnings and error messages flooded his processor and he shunted them aside, designated a portion to deal with those as the rest of him dealt with the situation at hand.

As the security monitors watched Blues' arm lower, once they were sure that the situation had actually been taken care of, the alarms fell away to silence. X sighed heavily. "Zero, leave your weapons for now. Back up further," he instructed, trying to give Blues the room he needed to calm down, to settle his systems. "Blues?" he asked, turning his attention once more to his brother, halo flashing between purple, orange, and red. "Blues, can I help?" His systems were already in enough of a tizzy; asking for permission as he shifted into Nurse mode would hopefully keep his brother's condition from worsening.

Blues' head had that odd tilt again as he listened to what they were saying on the security network while he listened to what X was saying, watched what he—and Zero—were doing. His systems calmed the barest amount when Zero backed away again, but he was still getting an avalanche of systems warnings and error messages—his buster wasn't as well-repaired as he'd hoped, it turned out—and he made a mental note to repair that when he repaired his teleportation matrix. Blues didn't flinch back from X this time, didn't tell him to stay away, but he did raise a hand to his head, his breathing a little bit heavy from so many systems reacting to defend him from Zero, his temperature once again a bit higher than it should be. He knew that he'd have to give X something resembling a reply or the Cyber Elf would expend his energy unnecessarily trying to heal him, so he made sure his vocals were functioning properly before saying in a low voice, "It's not…the same thing." Not what was wrong earlier, not an attack from his condition, even if some of the symptoms looked the same.

_Not the same?_ X realized that healing him as he had earlier may not have the same effect, but that didn't stop his halo from locking on red, his eye scanning his brother, systems saving the status windows to be opened once this situation had been resolved, once he would have the time to see what was wrong with his brother. By learning what was wrong, by understanding through the status screens where the real problems were, he hoped that he could eventually figure out a cure.

He wanted to find a way to get his brother back into true green. This baseline he had? Unacceptable.

One of the status messages caught his attention, and he pulled the file just as soon as it had been dropped into the folder cataloguing this attack—whatever it was—for him to review. _Third Law_? he mused for a moment, eyes going wide at the realization. Looking at his brother, he was sure the robot could see the shock written on his face.

X hadn't realized until then that Light had installed in his eldest child Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics.

He shuddered at the thought.

Blues frowned, not at all certain what had X looking so surprised. It took him a moment to realize that he must have seen the status messages from the Third Law and a moment more to realize how incredibly out of place the Law must seem to the android. He looked _horrified._

Blues had been horrified, too, when he woke up with the Laws installed.

Blues shifted from his defensive position finally, his defensive protocols relaxing after a span of time passed and he still wasn't being attacked and he settled to sit on the floor, to give himself a moment to clear out his logs and dismiss the error messages and threat level warnings.

He needed to build a logic chain to combat the Third Law about why disarming was alright, but the only data he really had to counter the Third Law's argument was that Zero put his weapons down and that X was here. Blues was certain that Zero was proficient in hand-to-hand combat and X couldn't physically block anything. He sighed as he reviewed the Third Law's argument, pulled from past experiences, from data he'd compiled over the years. The program wasn't intelligent enough to figure nuances out and so, it railed at him.

X was torn. While he had learned of the _theoretical_ application of Asimov's law through literature and media that Doctor Cain had provided for him in his early days, he had never thought that mechanical life of _any_ form was so constrained, so imprisoned, by a set code of behavior. There had been books, movies, scenarios, where those in power were able to route around the First Law and turn robots into killing automatons. There were scenarios in which the Laws brought humanity to its knees for its own protection.

With a faint shudder, X looked to his brother. "Please tell me that you don't have the Zeroth Law in place as well." It was not a question; X understood the volatility inherent in the addendum law. With the condition of the world as it was now? If Blues had the Zeroth Law in addition to the other three?

Blues almost laughed. Instead a slow smirk found its way to his lips, but his voice was rueful. "No, they weren't that stupid. Only the Three were installed." Even though that in itself was excessive.

He was still bitter. It was hard not to be.

Well, the fact that he hadn't been attacked by the Zero unit was proving a compelling argument to the Third Law and Blues had nearly managed to coax it back into its box. He was keeping one eye on Zero, still a distance behind X and out of immediate reach of his weapons, still not quite able to trust that he wouldn't spring up and rush through X to kill Blues.

The Robot Masters, after all, would have been a major obstacle in achieving his programmed purpose.

This time, it was Zero who responded. Though he had no idea about what these 'laws' they were discussing were, he knew that the entire situation had begun simply because of him rushing about with no consideration. This unit, whoever he was, was also X's friend, a trusted companion from the past. Moving further back, Zero knelt down, his forehead almost touching the cool metal plating of the floor. "Forgive me, Master Blues," he intoned softly, though loud enough that the Reploid should have been able to hear him. "I meant no offense," he said.

He was still trying to make sense of the memory file, but at the moment, with the file finally closed and his attention centered on the events at hand, he needed to make this unit trust him, if only to keep from being blown to pieces.

Zero couldn't for the life of him figure out _why_ Blues acted as if Zero's only purpose in life was to harm him.

Blues didn't get up from his sitting position on the floor, though he did tense some when Zero moved again. _Master_ Blues? This time, a completely different set of programmed instincts flared to attention and Blues had to sigh again, try to force them from the forefront of his thoughts. Except no, these protocols were much more harmonious than the clamor of the Three Laws and fell far more in line with his well-established personality. He doubted the Zero unit truly understood what he was implying by addressing Blues as such, no more than the other Resistance members did, and trying to explain why addressing him as such might not be a good idea would blow his cover. But if this unit was willing to be subservient?

Blues was already recalculating, though he felt that if he did take Zero's 'offer' to heart, that he'd be adopting a shark of sorts that, once his memory was restored, would turn and swallow Blues up as soon as he was able. This annoyed him and even though he knew it was probably showing up on his face to some extent, he wasn't about to go explaining _why_ to Zero or to X.

He knew he had to respond to Zero in some regard; had X been a Robot Master, he'd have linked to him to communicate, but the only tool he truly had was words, although X may be able to glean some further meaning from those error messages he'd been collecting. He had half a mind to block the android from them, they'd only trouble him.

He reminded himself one more time that androids and Reploids were _not _Robot Masters, then spoke. "You startled me," scared the living _shit _out of him when he was on edge to begin with. "I did not mean to…upset you, either." Which was about as close to an apology as he could manage. As far as Blues was concerned, his reaction to Zero dropping down behind him with a weapon drawn was completely understandable and acceptable. Blues' buster wasn't even working up to spec, his teleporter was down, and he was armorless. Of course he charged up a shot first: what other recourse did he have?

Part of him was glad he hadn't needed to fire. Releasing a charged shot with his buster in such a state of disrepair _would_ have cracked it open.

X dared to take a step back, to look at Zero. While he couldn't really fathom the intricacy of Robot Masters and the way they established their rank system, he did recognize, much like with Rocinolle, that there was an inherent difference to his brother for someone to call him 'Blues-dono' versus 'Master Blues'. With Zero's memories as they were, however, and little reason to believe Zero was as informed, he didn't think the blonde understood what he just did.

"Zero," he said, waiting for the android to raise his head, "what were you doing on this level anyway?"

"Cerveau and I had been working on repairs for a buster pistol that had been jamming. I…I came down here to test it at the firing range and get some target practice in while I was at it. I…" He looked down. "I made the mistake of dropping down the ladder shaft right behind Master Blues. I think he may have seen me landing, with the pistol in hand, as an offensive move, as an attack."

"And your saber? That was not in your other hand, I would guess."

"No," Zero replied, shaking his head. "I drew the saber as a deflector when I rolled out of Master Blues' initial line of fire." He didn't bother telling X about the memory file the incident had restored.

X looked to Blues once more, querying his status, before looking at Zero and the scattered weapons on the floor. "It would be in Blues' best interests if he were given a moment more to relax. I'm surprised he's still as okay as he is," all things considered, "especially since he only escaped retirement last night." That he had a weapon then was something he'd have to address later. "I need to get you out of here, on your way," he told Zero.

"Blues, I explained to you last night," another lie in a way, "about the Hacker controls I can exert, correct? If I were to assume direct control over Zero, would you be okay with me getting him out of the general vicinity? I realize that you're probably still on edge, but it may at least remove the primary stressor."

Even someone else carrying his weapons to Zero once Zero left would have been more than sufficient, but Blues nodded: this method would work just fine as well. His systems didn't register X as any more of a threat as his other siblings (except Rock, that was the only family member whose threat level consistently remained around zero percent), so if X was controlling the Zero unit, his systems would accept that as a vanquished threat.

Even if a vanquished foe would have been far more effective.

He supposed that his buster had come as something of a shock to the Resistance members here. Their comm network was abuzz with fresh gossip and Blues was honestly shocked that they were surprised that someone who wanted out of Neo Arcadia was armed. Would it be plausible to claim that he armed himself in preparation, in anticipation of his solo escape from the city?

Not that they'd take his word for it: they seemed to think he was a terrible person (and suicidal) for drawing his buster on Zero, so perhaps it'd be best to let X figure out how to say it.

He wanted his armor back, but that was an involved process that would require several incriminating boxes just to start with, so perhaps it was more prudent to save that for later, when the base either finds out what he is or they drive him from this place. Hopefully, he'd have Rock up and alert by then. Another trip into Neo Arcadia would be risky, Blues reflected, and even though he was convinced they were incompetent, a regime like that doesn't rise and hold by being consistently stupid. Going in as he had last night had been hasty: he was lucky no one intercepted him. It'd be for the best if he laid low and constructed a more solid plan before trying that again.

X nodded, his halo shifting to steady blue, eyes burning the same deep cerulean that Zero's eyes had once been. "Zero, for your own safety, do not fight me." Reaching out, he felt Zero's system respond to his touch, on the defensive the moment it recognized the threat. "Relax," X said, latching onto Zero's motor control functions. This was, after all, a very powerful android he was trying to control the same as he could Reploids.

Zero tensed as he felt the strange energy coil around him, driving through his processor and ejecting him from the mainframe for his motor controls. Systems armed against the hack attempt, defensive protocols going active, anti-hack programs waking from a long dormancy, and Zero had to cage the beast ripping against its chains to attack the source.

"Control," X said, feeling Zero's systems rebelling against his efforts. "Control it, Zero. Subdue it."

The blonde continued to hold the anti-hack in bay, afraid of what it would do to X if it was let loose. Hands that were no longer his own reached out for the weapons strewn on the floor. Legs he could not control brought him into a crouch, raised him to his feet. Saber dropped into sheath, followed by Zero's pistol. His body moved slowly, the commands coming from an ethereal somewhere that suffered a mild delay. Kneeling, Zero watched his hand wrap around the pistol he had been going to the range to test-fire, wrapping around the barrel to keep from being too close to the trigger.

Standing once more, Zero moved past X, beyond Blues, and to the hallway beyond.

X released his control as soon as Zero had turned the corner and continued on to the firing range. Sighed, he dropped to the floor, resting against the wall next to his brother.

Blues was still working on the error messages and warnings, trying to coax his systems back down into some semblance of normal operations. Or as normal as his operations got. He was leaning his back against the wall, though his body wasn't totally relaxed: he was still tense, still poised to get up and _defend himself._ His buster was completely gone and his arm looked normal, like a human's again: his systems were a lot more compacted than a Reploid's since he didn't have nanites to consider. It streamlined his design, though the nanites themselves were useful, not a design element that Blues would discard. The comm network was still buzzing with messages and gossip and the security network was quieter, but they were tense now, paying quiet attention.

"You certainly got the base riled up real quick," X commented. "You okay?"

"I'll…be fine." As fine as he could be after that, at any rate. His breathing was returning to a normal rate now, his core temperature cooling back to the norm. The armor he wore actually helped with ventilation and cooling; the battle systems Wily installed were excellent, but his frame wasn't made for them. The armor compensated, gave him the ability to fight and not rip himself up doing so, though he still managed to ruin his buster more than once.

X began flipping through the status windows that had been saved during his two scans that day, taking note of each status and keeping track, watching for trends and patterns. "So," he said, keeping his voice low since he didn't want Blues to think he was about to launch into another diatribe, "you actually have a prototype program, a coded version of Asimov's laws. That's…that's got to be difficult to live with."

Blues nodded slightly. Difficult didn't even begin to cover it. His voice was a low tone to match X's when he responded, "I've acclimated to them as time went on. It was…an enforced law, then, for all registered robots and Robot Masters to have them installed." And being the prototype, Blues often had the distinguished honor of trying out and debugging new things, like a lab rat. What he didn't say was that his were installed well before they were required and they became law in part because of Doctor Light pushing them.

"So you're not the only one? My…our siblings? Whatever other robots there were back then?" He could barely fathom the need for them. All he had known was the judgment programs he had, the ethics testing, the right to choose what he did with his life, to make his own decisions as he deemed fit. Humanity had only fallen under his protection because they were someone worth protecting in his eyes. They had created robots once, had created Reploids because X had provided the framework. Reploids were, in X's eyes, responsible for the humans because the humans had been responsible for them. While the parent was supposed to provide for the children, at least by typical human standards, X hadn't seen it as a problem that humanity had taken a step back and let their children become their guardians.

"I'm sorry," he finally said after a moment.

"It's not something to feel sorry about," since it already happened and it wasn't X's fault. He'd had no weigh in when that decision was made. Blues didn't even have a say in it. "But none of Wily's had the Three Laws, of course." Otherwise, how could the wars have happened? "But it was agreed that such measures were…necessary." Blues didn't shrug, but the sentiment was clear in his voice. The world then had been…very different than the one now. Better in some ways, worse in others. At least now, Reploids were viewed as people. Robot Masters never quite got there.

"Not…not about what happened," X clarified. "At least, not that I could do anything about that. I mean…I mean that if you had the laws, if the robots had those…" He stopped. "You've been living in a world where we were seen as human, or at least pseudo-human, from practically the first Reploid's activation. You've lived in a world where we worked for humans, with them, at their side, and while we had the choice, you…you didn't. You've never had that choice, that fundamental right, to choose your path because of those laws." The First Law alone pissed X off to no end in that it inherently made mechanical life always second, always subservient, to humans, even when humans had been able to show as great a level of cruelty and malice as Sigma and the Maverick forces. If Reploids had those laws?

If they had them, Weil would not have been as opposed, as hated, during the Elf Wars. Under the control of insane Cyber Elves and bound to the code of the First Law? Reploids would not have stood a chance.

Blues nodded, he understood where X was coming from. "The laws are not as immutable as humanity would have liked. They do not work…quite the way they'd have preferred, but you're right. We never had a choice. I would have saved Ciel in Neo Arcadia either way, but I _did not have a choice._" He didn't know which was worse: being born, being activated with the laws intact or living as he had, remembering what it'd been like to be able to choose, then having that taken away. Having your free will irrevocably ripped from you.

"I'm honestly a bit surprised to hear that. I have seen the examples of the Laws in action through human media, so to see it from my perspective, where I have a choice in the matter? I could not imagine myself so constrained, so locked into a behavioral pattern that runs as completely counter-intuitive to everything in human nature. To hear one who has had to suffer the shackles of those rules say that he would still save a human? Part of me is thankful that you aren't more jaded, and yet I'm worried that you do that only to keep the Laws from overriding whatever may be left of your free will."

"I…hated humans for a long time. It's true. But it's not fair to condemn an entire race based on the actions of a few." Just the same way it wasn't right to condemn all robots for what Wily did, for what he forced his Robot Masters to do. Or to condemn all Reploids for the actions of someone like Copy X.

X fell silent, paying more attention now to the status alerts that he'd gotten scanning Blues, color-coding them blue for the first attack Blues had suffered and red for the second. They had then been sorted by error message origin class, and it was shocking how the majority of them either dealt with his core—which X was still confused about—and his processor. Closing his eyes, X focused fully on the windows, cutting all external stimuli as he began to sort through them again. He hadn't seen much of a pattern the first time around, but maybe a second glance…

"Blues," X finally asked, opening his eyes sometime later, thankful to see that the robot next to him was looking a bit better than he had when X had first gotten into the hall with him and Zero, "why are you such a conflicted mess inside? And I'm not waxing philosophic about that at all; your status messages are either conflict errors between the Laws and your processor, which I would think meant your programming, or between your processor and your core."

Blues stiffened considerably at X's question, as though he'd asked something deeply personal and slightly…not offensive, but something that Blues didn't like talking about. Of course, X seemed to be handpicking topics that Blues hated talking about regardless. He really didn't want to talk about this, about how incomplete he was, and more answers would lead to more questions, questions about a past that Blues didn't like thinking about. His mind raced as he tried to think of an answer that would satisfy X's prodding with minimal information. "I…already told you. I was the prototype model."

"After all these years," X mused, eyes turning downward at the thought, at the realization he hoped he was not coming to, "all the years that Light worked on me, on us...why would he willingly leave you so broken inside? For him to see us as his children, yet treat his eldest so...carelessly? I...If you don't want to talk about it, just say so. I'll drop it now." X had no intention of making his brother deal with a third attack today. "I'm sorry," he said, the next words coming out around a sob. "I just...I hope that someday you'll let me be family to you, trusted, so that I can understand what's wrong. So that maybe I...maybe I can finish what our father left incomplete and hurting."

Blues blinked: X interpreted that as Blues' _base programming_ being incomplete? That Doctor Light just got bored with Blues once the other Robot Master projects began? That…was actually a nicer story than the truth, Blues thought ruefully. He supposed it counted as a lie by omission by not correcting X's theory, but at the moment, this wasn't something Blues wanted to deal with. Though X's offer of completing his programming was, well, adorable. Blues tilted his head to one side, "It's…not something I like to talk about, no. But, I think you should get onto the communications network. They're really…I don't think this is a rumor mill you want spinning."

X sighed, floating onto his feet. "I'm almost afraid to ask how bad," he admitted. "You'll be okay if I hit the network for a few?"

Blues nodded, "I just need a few minutes." To recover his systems and to calm down; he wasn't in danger of another attack.

Moving down the hall, X downloaded into the local access point, sending out a sharp bark of '_Shut up!_' across the network, effectively muting the entire base. '_Does anybody wish to enlighten me about why my jumping onto the communication lines was precluded by the rushed sounds of way too much gossip?_'

The communications network remained silent for a moment longer before a voice piped up, soft and a little unsettled. '_Master X_,' it chimed, '_it's just that we don't know why this unit was armed, let alone willing to raise arms against Master Zero._'

'_Sentinella's right_,' another agreed. '_We've heard that you called this unit a coder, a Neo Arcadian programmer, but he acts more like a war veteran than a technician._'

'_So it would be unthinkable to see me as a technician when I was one of three Class SA Hunters a century ago?_' X fired back.

'_I don't understand the comparison, Master X._'

X shook his head. '_Alouette, I can tell you're on the net. Care to let Hirondelle in on what I used to do before the Maverick Hunters. I know _you_ at least listened to the stories._'

The cheery signal flared against X's energy, a signal X understood as Alouette being happy to see him on the network. '_Before you started working with Master Zero and the other Hunters to fight the bad guys, you were a lab technician with Doctor Cain. You helped study and develop Reploid programming and phy…fizz…I can't remember the big word you used. You haven't told me that story in a few years._'

X smiled, though he wasn't certain if the child-unit could understand the motion through a simple wireless connection. '_I worked on programming and physiology,_' X explained. '_Even before the Maverick Wars started, I preferred the settings of either a lab or a library. I was a researcher, a technician, and a bookworm. The only reason I knew I had armament was because it was in the scans and I had to test it out and figure out how it worked._'

'_I think we are still missing the point,_' Faucon stated. '_What does your history have to do with this unit?_'

'_Well, if you are all asking why and who, it's evident that Cerveau hasn't said anything on the net. At least he knows how to keep himself from blasting baseless rumors all over the network like a bored suburbanite housewife._'

'_Like a what?_' Sentinella asked.

'_Never mind,_' X said, sighing. '_It's a very dated human idiom. Regardless, I explained to Cerveau that Blues, like Zero, is an old friend from back in the days of the Maverick Hunters. That means,_' he clarified, '_he's from the point in time when Reploids built as _crossing guards _still had busters and the like as standard equipment. That he has survived life in Neo Arcadia so long has been a miracle that I did not expect when the copy took my place. Zero, at least, had been sealed in a lab and lost to the ages. Zero, for all of you, was a legend we knew we could believe in because even _I_ had lost track of where he was being kept, but I knew he was still alive. Blues? To know that he survived, to find him on chance? I cannot say just how lucky we truly proved night before last._'

'_He's so reclusive, though. Very few of us—_'

X cut Colbor off, derailing that train of thought before it even got out of the station. '_After being subjected to the controls exerted by Neo Arcadian military, the death threats made for allowing our natural human-grade personality programs to flourish, how many of you came to this base and were willing to even say hello or shake hands with others here?_' The silence that followed cleanly detailed the very argument X was trying to make. '_This was an unexpected arrival, yes, and Blues is…a little different than those you've met here before, as those we've recovered from the city. Again I state, he's not from your time, not from the world you know, the world and time you were activated in. Do any of you, _any of you_, realize that comparatively, Blues makes _Andrew_ look young?_' If his brother was on the network, X realized as an afterthought, he'd likely have to explain himself and apologize to Blues later.

'_We,_' X continued, '_Blues, Zero, and I—we are from a different age. We have seen far worse atrocities than you can imagine, lived through events that make Neo Arcadia's current state and ruling class look like snobby aristocrats simply turning their noses up at the common folk._' X stopped, realizing that the reference he just used probably sailed just as high over their heads as the housewife comment. '_You were all activated in a human-Reploid utopia built as a haven that would support our races as the Reploid crews recovered the Earth, made the world habitable outside of the biodomes and floater colonies. We, on the other hand, come from an age where you were seen as naïve and immature if you _weren't_ looking over your shoulder every few minutes._'

X almost reclined on the network, suspended as he was in the data flow. '_So, while I'm here and apparently have to dissuade ten months' worth of rumors and crackpot theories that spasmed out of your collective consciousness in all of twenty-four hours, care to let me in on what outlandish theories are topping the charts right now?_'

Almost immediately, X watched nearly a third of the currently logged access codes disconnect from the net as a reply to his question. It was with no small sense of disdain that a chunk of the access points were from the security team. While staying on the comm was a great way for them to remain in contact with the whole base, they certainly had better things to be doing than bantering amongst each other about the 'odd' newcomer.

'_Okay,_' he said to those that remained on the net, '_now that I've got room in here to hear myself think, anyone want to offer up a nice big theory bubble for me to pop?_'

'_There has been…the discussion among the security team,_' Faucon admitted, '_that Blues-dono may be operating as a Neo Arcadian spy, especially since we do have a decent track record for getting scheduled retirees out of the city._'

'_Under what pretense?_' X asked. '_Hirondelle, you've been in contact with Neige and her group in the city. There any reason to think they'd be sending an old friend of _mine_ to meet with the Resistance?_' X didn't like the thought. If something had slipped, if the city knew he wasn't dead, if they knew that Master X wasn't actually the Reploid that was commanding their city?

They'd have noticed by now.

'_Neige has reported nothing to me,_' he answered, '_though that doesn't guarantee that your presence here has not been relayed to Neo Arcadia by another channel._'

'_I seriously doubt that anyone would know. My presence in the city, what few times I am there, is kept cloaked. Even Phantom would have trouble seeing me on the net._' A Robot Master was another thing, but that matter was not up for public discussion. '_Hirondelle, as our resident authority on all things espionage and sneaky, what's your professional assessment of Blues?_'

The communications net died again for a moment, everyone seemingly waiting to hear what an actual spy had to say on the matter. '_Honestly, he's acting more like a war veteran, possibly an ex-Maverick that was reclaimed before or during the Elf Wars,_' a term that would have compared to 'ex-prisoner of war' to humans, '_so the jumpiness doesn't really stand out as indicative of double agent. Despite my general lack of direct contact with ex-Mavericks, mostly due to my operational age, I'm familiar with the more common psychological effects reported in units reclaimed around the time of the Elf Wars._' There was almost a shrug in his voice. '_Was Blues Maverick at some point, Master X?_'

An incredibly private communication line flared to life with X, one that not even the security team would detect, from a user that only X was aware of. _'My being an ex-Maverick would fit in well with what they're seeing and…my being a war veteran is not a lie,'_ and it was best to lace these kinds of stories with truth. Blues seemed slightly amused by the Maverick reference, as though he was smirking slightly as he said it. He sounded completely normal over the net, didn't sound like he'd had a terrible day at all. His systems must still have been in an uproar, but he was able to mask it chillingly well.

Hirondelle's voice shifted after a moment of continued silence from X. '_Master X, I meant no offense and I hope this didn't bring up anything…negative about your past with Blues._'

'_Nothing of the sort,_' X returned. '_At least, nothing so bad I can't talk about it. It's just…sometimes I hate being reminded how terribly _old_ I am. But I am impressed with your assessment. I would not have thought anyone from the city would have read up on Reploid psychology regarding the reclaimed Mavericks, even though you were one of the first to join the Resistance. And yes, Blues was a reclaimed unit._' The thought of Blues as a Maverick, even with the Laws in place, make X shudder.

Blues doubted he could go Maverick, not the way Reploids could. The virus was engineered specifically to target Reploid minds, so against a Robot Master, it wouldn't do much good.

Of course, a Robot Master could still be shut down and reprogrammed. Still, listening to their incessant chatter provided valuable insight into what the Reploids here thought of him, told him a lot about the community dynamics at work here. It was startling how human they were, how human their thought processes were.

Either way, he listened carefully to X's story, added it to this persona they were building for him: their stories needed to be _identical_ from here on out.

'_Now, is there anything else I need to be made aware of, or can I leave the lot of you to your own devices without this dissolving into a conspiracy web that makes Copy X look _sane_?_'

In the hall, Blues slowly got to his feet, leaning against the wall for support, one hand clutching at his chest. It hurt, even though he wasn't currently having an attack. With a sigh, he dropped his hand to his side: the last thing he wanted was X fussing over him again. The comm network was noticeably silent after X's last question and they reminded Blues of chided children. X didn't seem like one to scold often, so this talk he just had with them was a rare event.

He had a feeling that any gossip would resume in private channels for the time being.


	10. Adequate Protection

_ And here we are, back on our regular update schedule._  
><em> In today's little snippet of life in 22XX, Ciel is put on a stricter schedule regarding her sleep cycle, the box of Neo Arcadian parts is put to use, and X finally talks to Blues about that program that his elder brother put together for him.<em>  
><em> Oh, and we find out that even Blues enjoys the occasional Easter egg.<em>  
><em> Disclaimer: Mega Man and all related characters and information are the property of Capcom Co., Ltd., Akira Kitamura and Keiji Inafune.<em>

* * *

><p>Ciel walked into Cerveau's lab, Milan trailing her, as she stretched, letting out a soft yawn. "Morning, Cerveau," she chirped merrily, fully aware that it was already pushing late afternoon.<p>

Cerveau looked up from his work table, pushing back on his chair so he could get up. "Do you feel better now that you've slept?" She certainly looked better. She was actually alert this time around.

"A bit," she answered. "I actually kinda overslept."

Milan shrugged. "I didn't think there was any harm in letting her have a nine-hour sleep cycle."

"No, no harm at all." Though she'd missed quite a ruckus. Probably for the best, Cerveau thought. "Did you come for your check-up?"

Nodding, Ciel moved to the second table in the lab, as his first was covered with a variety of weapon parts, and jumped up to sit on it. "I wasn't even aware I was supposed to come in for one until after Milan woke me."

Cerveau shook his head, amused, "Master X asked me to give you a check-up after you woke." She'd really been exhausted. He went to a nearby sink to wash the machine oil from his hands, then grabbed his kit for human care. "He's worried about you, and so am I. You don't get nearly enough rest."

"Really?" Ciel tilted her head to the side. "Well, I'm here now, so…" She fell quiet for a moment, looking up as the medic approached her. "You know, I feel like I'm taking advantage of all of you, like I'm asking for special considerations, by sleeping longer than you."

Cerveau blinked: where did that come from? It was true that she did require more sleep than Reploids, but taking advantage of them? "Lady Ciel, why would you say that? You're not a freeloader here, you pull your weight. You need how much rest you need, there's no shame in that."

"That may be true, but my sleep cycle runs double yours, maybe more depending on what you've expended in terms of energy during the day. By the time I'm finally rolling out of bed, the base is up and running at full force. You're in the lab, have been for at least three hours. Rocinolle's probably exited her sleep cycle early to start working on her mechaniloids. The security monitors, Dande's group, only hit the rechargers once every seventy-two hours and in shifts to ensure that we've got a full crew on cams at all hours of the day and night."

Cerveau set his medical kit on the table beside Ciel with a slight frown and a sigh. They'd had this conversation before, more than once, and he didn't know how to communicate to the girl that her well-being was of far more concern to anyone in the base than her logging hours at the expense of her health. "And none of them are coming up with new ideas. You've contributed some invaluable things to our efforts. You need to look after yourself, too."

"And I try to," she argued, "I really do. I just…when something needs my attention, when I need to do something, _finish_ something, it's everything to me." She perked up, as if something had just come to mind. "Now that I think about it, Alouette mentioned chatter on the comms last week. I don't know if anyone mentioned it to you, but," and at this, Ciel shrugged, "I did not have anyone smuggle in caffeine supplements. The idea seems tempting, but I'm not one for the way I've heard those things taste."

"Caffeine is addictive anyway," Cerveau warned. "Just…when you schedule your day, schedule the time you need to take care of your mind and body as well." Cerveau had taken out the armband to measure her blood pressure with and was putting it over one of her arms as he spoke.

Milan had been silent, resting against the wall near the door, as Cerveau attended to Ciel. At the medic's last comment, his head perked up. "That means an eight- to ten-hours sleep cycle each night, right?"

Ciel looked at Milan, the look in her eyes pleading, as if begging him to let the matter drop. It was bad enough she was catching flak from X _and_ Cerveau; she didn't need another voice adding to the cacophony that tried to cut an entire third of each day away from her because she needed rest.

"Eight to nine. If humans get too much sleep, they become lethargic and it gets hard for them to concentrate. It just…has to be a full sleep cycle and it has to be continuous. If they wake up, it's not as restful. Though it varies from individual to individual, but given her age and how she works…eight to nine." So no, Cerveau was not approving any six or seven-hour sleep cycles for Ciel. It took him a minute to take her blood pressure, but when he completed the reading, he nodded in satisfaction. "One-sixteen over seventy-two…that's good."

Ciel sighed, running the fingers of one hand through her bangs before rubbing a hand against her forehead. She _hated_ it when they got protective of her like this, when they constrained her to normal human standards of what was needed without consideration for what the base needed, what time she had to devote to her research, how important her work was. If there were a couple days where her sleep cycle was cut short, it couldn't prove that detrimental. After all, she'd been operating on a shifting sleep schedule for nearly three years now and only once in a great while managed to get sick. And even then, a cold was no big deal.

Cerveau chose to diplomatically ignore Ciel's angst: even if she didn't want to recognize it, her health was important. He knew that young people, human and Reploid alike, tended to feel…infallible, to an extent. Tended to have an attitude of 'that won't happen to me'. Time tempered a person, though, made them more realistic about the world. Cerveau knew that he wasn't exactly 'old' compared to some of the others on the base (Master X), but he tried to keep that in mind, tried to be cautious with everyone because that was his job. Their well-being was _his_ responsibility. And so, Cerveau retrieved another tool, "I'm going to need to check your pupils, too."

It didn't take much for the researcher to realize what Cerveau was doing. "I already told you, I'm not using caffeine pills."

"Then you won't have a problem with this," Cerveau cheerfully returned, catching Ciel's chin on one hand to tilt her head so he could check her pupils' dilation. _'Milan,_' Cerveau messaged the other Reploid over the network, privately, knowing the human had no access to this communication method whatsoever_, "Will you please look through Lady Ciel's room and make sure she doesn't have any stimulants laying about?'_

Milan's head ticked to the side, as if something had drawn his attention. "If you'll excuse me, Ciel, I'm needed elsewhere. I should be back shortly."

Ciel, however, didn't bother replying, letting Cerveau reassure himself that she wasn't doing anything worse than prolonging her work hours and pulling the occasional all-nighter.

It was really just a normal physical, even if Cerveau was not-so-secretly checking her for signs of caffeine supplements, and before long he'd checked her heart and lungs as well. She was fine, but still was probably not getting enough sleep. At least a clean bill of health would calm his worries, and Master X's. "Master Zero came by this morning. He's already begun recovering his memory files," Cerveau couldn't keep the smile from his voice: he knew Ciel was torn up over that.

"And here you and X are, telling me that I don't need to work faster, shouldn't stay up later," she said, resisting the urge to start pouting like a scolded child. "I thought the whole point of my research was to see if there was a way to counteract what I did to Master Zero. What's the point, then, if he's already recovering the files?" Really, had it all been a ruse, a ploy to make her not feel guilty for what she'd done? Did they think she simply forgot the reason she'd been given the assignment, even though every moment she spent on it only drove the knife further into her conscience? "It's no small feat getting fresh crystal supplies for the elves working with me, and you threw me at a project that—"

"_Ciel."_ Cerveau's sharp tone cut her off, "Stop. This isn't about Master Zero. Did you know that the main cause of Reploid memory malfunction is because of electrical surges overloading their processors? Do you have any idea, _any idea_, how many people that research would benefit? It's something that very few people have honestly researched, forget getting actual headway. And now you have a subject that's begun recovering memories on his own. _There is data there that you need to gather."_

Ciel blanked out for a moment, staring at the medic as if he'd just told her that they had found life on another planet. Despite the truth of his statement and the fact that, like the rest of her work, the project's application reached far beyond the small network of friends and colleagues she had in the Resistance. For her to have let herself think so narrowly about what she was doing, what kind of research she was assigned to…

"I…I honestly don't know what to say, Cerveau," she admitted. "Maybe it's just that…I…" she huffed, dropping her head into her hands for a moment before shifting and letting her chin rest against her closed hands. "Even with you telling me this, letting me know that Master Zero is recovering already, I can't help but feel like I still messed up the one constant that X still believed in, the one remnant of his past that hadn't died in the wars. Had I stopped, had I _thought_, Master Zero wouldn't need to recover his memories. Everything would be there. He'd be intact, whole. He'd remember his own name, remember who he was, who he is."

"Are we done here?" she asked. "And do you have any idea where Master Zero is?"

Cerveau tilted his head, verifying Zero's location over the network, "He's still down on Level Five, at the shooting range with Faucon." Cerveau chose not to mention the…occurrence that'd happened earlier that day. Cerveau wasn't one to spread rumors and really, he thought it'd be best if that just died down.

Ciel pushed herself from the table, just getting to her feet, when Milan returned.

"Hey, Doc," he called out, "catch." A small metal cylinder flipped through the air, a soft clicking sound coming from the inside as it sailed towards the medic. "Found it in the back of the drawer she keeps the Energen Crystals in."

Ciel stopped cold when she realized what the container was.

Cerveau caught it in one hand, turning it in his hand slowly to read the label. He tilted his head up to look at Ciel. The only good thing about it was the bottle of caffeine pills was yet unopened. "Ciel…"

The young scientist simply stood there, mute, as she turned her eyes to the floor. _Why, Milan?_ she whined to herself.

Cerveau didn't need to say anything more to Ciel: she knew she was wrong. She knew it wasn't good for her, and yet she still acquired them. Instead, Cerveau turned to the network, looking for a particular ID. Thankfully, he was actually _online. 'Master X?'_

'_Yes, Cerveau?_' X had been on the net for a while, listening to the traffic, ensuring that, at least on the public section of the network, there weren't any more rumors flying around. Faucon had, a short while ago, sent an alert that anyone that wanted to start wagering crystals against Zero in a marksmanship contest was free to head down to the firing range. At least Zero's ego hadn't been damaged, he had thought jokingly, especially once bets _did_ start flying over the comm network.

It hadn't surprised X in the least that the majority of the wagers were actually in Zero's favor.

Cerveau was honestly sorry that he had to burden X with this when he had so many other things going on, but he couldn't order things like this unilaterally. _'I'm sorry to bother you, but Lady Ciel made an offhanded comment about taking caffeine pills and well…' _Well, this _was_ Ciel they were talking about, _'I asked Milan to take a look in her room; he found an unopened bottle. I'd like permission to post Milan to look after her and make sure she actually sleeps and doesn't…push herself unreasonably.'_

If there were a wall, an actual wall, on the network, X would have given it one solid smack with the front end of his helmet. '_Cerveau, is the comm relay in your lab online right now?_' He'd rather get a direct answer than have to check all the network access terminals.

Cerveau had to glance over to it to be sure, but, _'Yes, it is.'_

Moving for the fourth floor terminal bank (and for the millionth time, it seemed, wondering why the terminals lined up in a neat little row when they were physically so far apart), he quickly figured out which one was in Cerveau's main lab. He had to bite back the urge to let Ciel really know what was on his mind at that moment, opting for silence as he let the human commander realize just how much trouble she'd just gotten herself into.

Cerveau couldn't even feel bad for Ciel. She needed to understand. A bottle of caffeine pills may have seemed like something small, something they were overreacting to, but if she honestly did become dependent on them? Caffeine pills could be dangerous if not taken properly, and there were no safety instructions or even an identifying label on the bottle.

"I'm really starting to wonder what it is that's so debilitatingly bad about sleep from a human perspective that you seem to be hell-bent on avoiding it." Sure, he knew that some people suffered from night terrors, that some forms of human emotional and psychological trauma led to a fear or aversion of dreaming, but as far as he was aware, Ciel had never suffered anything that would have set that off. Yes, she'd lost both of her parents over the course of her life, but it was rare to see that create something ingrained deep enough into the psyche to actually scare her away from sleeping. "Part of me wants to believe that this is just some crazy misunderstanding, that you weren't really considering getting through your days by developing a chemical dependency. You're too smart for that kind of nonsense, and Cerveau and I have both explained to you that the most important thing you do for us is take care of yourself. Yes, I realize that some days, you don't get a full sleep cycle before your body demands that you be up and active. That's fine. Everyone has those days. But to use caffeine, to use _anything_ to alter your body's chemical operations…"

He looked at the girl. "I realize that, yes, you're eighteen. You're practically a grown woman. I know that, and I acknowledge it. But you're also one of the Resistance commanders, responsible for the research that needs to be done to help us reclaim and fix Neo Arcadia. You can't just keep playing it off like you're okay when you're not getting enough sleep, when you're working yourself sick, when you have that responsibility to bear." He looked at the bottle Cerveau was holding. "Do you even know how many pills you'd be allowed to take each day?"

"Two to four is the usual range for any medication," Ciel answered. "And I'm not supposed to take them before I go to bed because that…that actually would keep me awake."

In response, Cerveau cracked the bottle open and shook some into his palm, them immediately frowned, a bit of a cold feeling coming over his systems. "You're right about not taking them before going to bed, though it'd be more correct to say to take them ten hours before you intend to get anything resembling sleep. And never, never assume the dosage based on number of pills. You're very young and you have a very small frame, even for a human female. These are large enough that two would be dangerous to you," forget what _four_ would have done to her systems, "and caffeine is a diuretic. You'd have to drink extra water to keep your systems healthy. Regular caffeine usage impacts the human body's ability to absorb calcium, so had you used them more than rarely, you'd have needed a supplement. They're addictive, very addictive, on top of all that, and had you deprived yourself of enough sleep, relied on these too many nights in a week, you could fall asleep in the middle of a task, like a narcoleptic. What if you were doing something dangerous, using a blade or something with a current? And that doesn't even touch upon _where_ these are from and _what else _might be in them."

Ciel actually teetered back against the exam table, staggering at the realization of just what those pills would have done. She'd seen them used before: her father had taken a couple a few times a month when a project was being impossible or something needed to be done, but other than that? She hadn't known about the side effects at all. Calcium deficiency? Extra water? That alone would have required more runs into the city, possibly requiring Neige or one of their other contacts to falsify a medical report just for the calcium supplements. It would also indicate that there was a human involved in the Resistance, since Reploids didn't make use of pills in the same manner. Even the caffeine pills had been a risk.

All that said nothing of the risk she presented to herself if she did overuse the pills and fall asleep at her computer or her workbench. While the former wasn't all the dangerous, save for waking up to a long string of whatever letter she'd hit on the keyboard with her face, the latter _was_ a threat. Monofilament wire, surgical blades, handheld welding torches - her workbench would have been the last place she would have wanted to be when the pills stopped working.

Cerveau dumped all but one of the pills back into the bottle. He popped the remaining pill into his mouth and swallowed it. As a medical unit, he had a system specifically constructed to break down and analyze chemicals. Ciel hadn't dared meet his or X's gaze the entire time. After a few moments, the analysis was completed and under his visor, Cerveau's eyes became round.  
>"Ciel. <em>Who gave this to you?"<em>

She was silent for a long moment, still unable to look at any of the three in the room with her.

"Aptikari," she finally whispered.

X looked at her when she finally provided the name, holding back from yelling at her about contacting that particular Reploid. Since human health was such a concern, doctors and other skilled medical techs were important Reploids to the city. Aptikari had been contacted for the first time a year prior, when Ciel had been unfortunate enough to come down with strep throat and they had needed to get her antibiotics. How she'd even caught the illness had been beyond them, though they figured that it may have been from Ciel's contact with Neige's group a short time prior.

Medical supplies were closely regulated to ensure that individuals who posed a health risk to the rest of the population were kept either under observation or in quarantine. Neige had offered to be the runner, reporting to Aptikari for treatment and getting the much-needed drugs relayed to the Resistance. This…X didn't even want to know if she had even _bothered_ with a runner.

Cerveau sighed, "This isn't…it's not caffeine. It's _methylphenidates_. It's a medicine for narcoleptics. It increases production of dopamine and norepinephrine," both of which would increase her heart rate and thus, her blood pressure, "and…did Aptikari even _give_ you dosage instructions? Half of one of these is for a human adult, but for someone your age? Taking _two to four?"_ She'd have gotten really sick, she'd barely have been able to stand steadily. Cerveau had to cut himself off there, had to force himself to stop because the anger was creeping into his voice and really, that never helped with Ciel.

"I told him my father had used them, so I knew what I was doing. He make a point of telling me that I wasn't supposed to use them more than once a week, and no more than once a month if I could avoid it."

"Were you honestly going to regulate yourself to that kind of usage? And even if you were, you said two to four pills when the actual dosage instructions are half a tablet a day. If I'm not mistaken," X said, looking to Cerveau, "had those been prescribed, wouldn't she have had to be placed under observation, at least for the first week, to make sure that she wasn't dealing with the hypertensive side effect?" Being a lab tech early on really made X aware of all the things that could go wrong with human medications that were meant to help the person feel right again.

"Yes, there would have been at least one follow up, with instructions to see the physician immediately should she feel unwell." Cerveau wasn't quite successful with keeping the frustration from his voice, but at least it was directed at Aptikari and not Ciel.

X turned to the Reploid hovering by the door. "Milan, I need to ask a favor of you. I know that I assigned you as Ciel's bodyguard when we were planning to rescue Zero. Now, however, I need to upgrade your assignment."

Milan nodded. "To what, Master X?"

"I need you to keep an eye on Ciel. A more direct eye. As you did today, I want you to ensure that she goes to sleep in her bed, even if that requires moving her to said bed from wherever she crashes. Hopefully," he said, looking to the girl, "she'll realize this is for her own good and get to bed at a reasonable hour. Once she has been asleep for an hour, I want you in a recharger. The four-hour cycle you normally need will complete before she wakes up, even if her sleep cycle does get cut short. I'm not going to fault her for waking up early every now and again, but she needs to get as complete a cycle as possible each night. From there, you will serve as her lab assistant as well as her guardian."

X turned to Ciel. "I'm not doing this to punish you, Ciel. Please try to understand. All I'm trying to do, as strict as this may seem, is show you how you're supposed to take care of yourself. You're a scientist. Observe yourself as you go through your days. See how you feel. If need be, keep a log of it. See that this, doing this, is better than pushing yourself to the point of breakdown. We'll see how you do after a month."

Milan nodded, understanding. "I will do everything I can to ensure that Ciel remains in good health and continues to take care of herself."

Ciel only shrugged. At this point, any argument would have been moot. X had his say, and even if she was co-commander, his word was final.

* * *

><p>Once it was evident that X was going to be on the network for more than a minute or two, Blues straightened from the wall he'd been leaning on. He'd already seen Rocinolle before his encounter with Zero: he pretty much gave her a homework assignment and told her that he expected to be impressed with the Condoroids the following day. The portion of the coding she'd be concentrating on was similar enough to what the Hoppiders needed that Blues didn't think she'd have a problem projecting the problem-solving approaches to the Condoroids.<p>

And so, Blues decided to spend the rest of the day alone, away from the rest of the base. He was certain that they wouldn't dare disturb him for the remainder of the day and even X would probably be giving Blues his space.

The short lift ride down to the sixth level and subsequent walk to his room was uneventful. The door slid open obediently and locked securely behind him.

He just stood there for a moment, as though gathering himself and focusing his objectives. Deciding where to even _begin._

He eventually sat down cross-legged on the floor beside the bed and reached under, catching hold of the Neo Arcadian box and pulling it forward to rest beside him. The first thing he needed to do was organize the parts and separate out which were for him and which were for Rock. Rock's were much more by volume, but Blues knew that he couldn't continue with his buster as it was, so he took some of Rock's buster parts—Blues had enough made for both of Rock's busters—for his own and set them aside, beside the parts for his teleportation matrix.

That had to be his highest priority. He couldn't continue this way.

The matrix was in his variable system even though it was more common for it to be in a Robot Master's head case—this enabled Blues to do more maintenance on himself than was normally possible—and so he rolled his sleeve up, allowing the buster casing to envelop his arm once again. Then he allowed it to open up so the inner components could be accessed. He grimaced slightly; it was a mess, and began his work.

He really would have rathered that Rock had use of both of his busters, but his was so bad off…even charging it was stressing his systems. He needed a weapon that wouldn't break from a single shot.

He didn't have to test the teleportation matrix to know when it was back online. He'd done maintenance on it dozens of times before, interchanged parts on his own for so long that he could tell with a glance whether something was functional.

He couldn't be cornered without an out any more. It was such a relief.

His buster was quicker to repair; he hadn't actually cracked the casing and the new parts would ensure that the power would be focused properly, even with the unwieldy energy his core provided. When Wily found him and worked on him, he'd rerouted much of Blues' body to contend with the massive power output that the core would provide. The armor further stabilized his systems while he was in combat, when his core's power would be more heavily relied upon, and really, not having it was the same as not having a lot of his support systems.

Rock wasn't engineered that way, however, and concentrating on the little robot's welfare put Blues into a more positive mindset. Nothing was wrong with Rock's body that couldn't be fixed, nothing was missing that couldn't be replaced. He'd be able to wake Rock with systems showing green all down the line and from there, they could work on the portions of his memory damage that Blues couldn't properly fix himself. A good portion of it would require Rock himself to restore, but he could at least borrow Blues' processor power to help speed things along.

Two heads were better than one, after all. And when Robot Masters put their heads together, it was in a literal sense: they could share one another's headspace, borrow one another's processing power should the situation call for it.

And this situation called for it.

Blues began unwrapping Rock's various parts, going by which portion of the child's body he was working on and soon his floor was littered with swatches of padded, static-proof cloth and Blues was half-kneeling on the bed, one foot still on the floor, restoring the connections around Rock's power source so that the circuit around his body would be completed. He knew that letting Rock sit in the sun to charge would be out of the question in their current situation, but he could charge off Blues' core the first time around, and then use the charger after, if he wanted.

If he could stand sitting still that long. Though they could probably arrange for him to charge while he was working in the base if the child became that insistent. Worse came to worse, he could just charge off Blues: not like_ his_ power ever ran low.

There was something soothing about doing lab-like work: that had been part of his original purpose, even if his task set had more to do with coding and less to do with construction and maintenance. Rock's physiological design was nearly identical to Blues', save that Rock was smaller and appeared younger, and so anything that broke was fixed the same way between the two units.

It certainly simplified things.

It would be nice once another Robot Master was up and about, once the harmonic thrum on the network could begin to take place. There needed to be at least two units for that thrum of logic and harmony to really begin washing over the network and that was one thing that Blues truly did enjoy. X might like it too, though it wasn't that spectacular until there were five or six. Going onto the Wilybots' network was truly…it wasn't music, wasn't audible, but it felt that way in the rhythm and harmony. Like an orchestra for the mind.

Blues chose the buster in Rock's dominant hand to repair and was relieved to see that it wasn't as badly off as his: just a lot of old parts, weakened by time. Nothing truly broken. That was an easy fix.

* * *

><p>Seeing as this wasn't one of the nights the Resistance had planned for a raid, which only ever happened at night unless drastic measures were required to get someone or something out of Neo Arcadia, activity in the base was next to nil shortly before midnight, since most of the Reploids had started heading for their chargers well before then. With his need for a charge no longer prioritized—seeing as he'd recharged after the first incident with Blues—X was heading down to the sixth level for something he should have picked up first chance Blues had actually given him.<p>

He really hoped he wasn't disturbing his brother's sleep cycle. He honestly had no idea when Blues preferred to sleep, seeing as he probably only needed an hour or two more than Reploids.

X stopped for a moment at Zero's door, tempted to go in and see how the android was doing, especially in the wake of his game with Faucon earlier. Had Zero retained his memories, X was almost assured that today's marksmanship win would have left Zero with an inflated ego for the rest of the night. As it was, the android had simply exchanged a parting handshake with Faucon before returning the pistol to Cerveau.

He had been honestly surprised when Cerveau handed him a small bag of Energen Crystals.

Zero had no idea the medic had put a wager down in his name.

Shaking his head, X made for Blues' door, triggering the bell.

Blues had been seriously contemplating defragging when the bell chimed. He'd been sitting on the bed this time, the bundle situated behind him, his trench thrown over it once again. He lifted his head and shifted so that he was sitting cross-legged.

He'd even taken his boots off.

Mere moments after the chime finished sounding, the door slid open.

X stepped in, smiling at his brother even though his position on the bed left X wondering if Blues was about to go to sleep. The smile faltered when he saw Blues' boots sitting at the foot of the bed. "I hope I didn't come at a bad time. I wasn't sure when you started your sleep cycle, or if you even have a preferred time for it."

"Don't worry about it," Blues waved X's concerns off; he could defrag after X left.

X nodded, looking once more at the trench coat and wondering just what it was that Blues had under there. It was none of his business, but that didn't help his curiosity not want to get the better of him. "I wanted to know if there was enough time tonight to load the defense program," he said, "and wanted to know how it was supposed to be implanted if my systems outright reject outside programming. I know you used my code when you made it, but…" X shrugged.

Understanding only a fraction of his own systems made it difficult to fully determine how things would and wouldn't work. He'd had enough trouble trying to figure out how to upload the programs for all the languages he had to learn once his technology had gone mainstream and he actually had to talk in public about the replicated android project Doctor Cain had begun.

"You cannot be reprogrammed in the sense that an outside source can't force its way into your systems and exert changes on any aspect of yourself. You can welcome new programs and systems changes, provided you consciously permit the installation. It's like learning, though in a way…different from how humans do it. That's one of the main differences between what you are and what I am. Of course, it must be coded in a way your system will accept; just anything won't do. That's why your coding was so useful for this project." Blues suspected as much from Rock's descriptions of the X project, but seeing his coding gave the Robot Master a far fuller understanding.

"It's really that easy?" X was baffled. If the addition of programs to his system was that simple, why were there no prompts with the uploads he'd tried in years before? What had kept him from knowing that aspect of his programming, of his system? "Why would something that simple…why would it be something I didn't know?"

"I cannot say. It could be that whatever you were trying before wasn't coded in properly, but by the way Doctor Light programmed you, by the format he designed _for you_, this program should work." If it didn't, Blues would need to seriously reevaluate not only X's coding, but also his own competence at doing what he was built for.

"So…" X said, moving to the computer terminal. "Something tells me that uploading it will be the easy part. Application, actual knowledge of how to use it, will likely be something completely different."

Blues' head tilted to follow X's movement across the small room. "Yes. I will walk you through how to properly implement it. You may need to delegate new input to your senses—I suggest sight—and there will likely be some clutter until you figure out how you want the data organized." The program was an active defensive program: it monitored constantly rather than only rearing to life once an attack already happened.

"New input?" X wondered what that could have meant. "I think I may have to see how this works before I can figure out what gets delegated to what. Need me to load into the net?"

Blues nodded as he shifted position on the bed, turning a bit to face toward X. "Yes, that'll be quickest. I can bring you to a secluded section of the security network again. You'll be able to practice there in peace," without others prodding as to what exactly Master X was doing, "though I'll let you know if anything…urgent comes up over either the security or communications networks."

"I meant to ask you about that. When did you link into the networks? No one here seems to know that you've gone online, and I'm sure you've heard the chatter about how you haven't really bothered to say hi to anyone. After a few weeks, even the excuse that you lived in Neo Arcadia is going to sound strained." He pressed against the terminal, dropping into the security network, knowing that his brother would pull him where he needed to go.

He had to admit, having a true admin on the system, having someone that could move him through the network, made it a lot easier to navigate than him moving on his own through the data streams.

Blues grabbed X before the security team even registered him online and moved him to the sequestered portion of the server before answering, _'I connected to the security network as soon as I arrived. I can…make an account that feels like a human's or like a Reploid's,' _even though he didn't like to, _'though constraining myself so, even as a puppet, is frustrating.'_  
>Blues gave X a moment to reorient himself in the data flow before sending him a prompt to accept the file transfers. He imagined X would take his time to go over the program first, but that was fine with Blues; he was in no hurry and he didn't want X to rush himself through this, either.<p>

X accepted the transfer, but he didn't set the files to download to his systems. Even with as little as he understood about his code as a whole, whatever he didn't get of the program he could go over with Blues. As it stood, it would probably benefit him to…

'_Blues, is there any chance that I can get the decrypted files of my programming code?_' The sooner X learned the full extent of his coding, the faster he'd be able to apply that to future programs for himself, as well as further upgrades for the Reploids. If he needed the program this much, there was little argument that the Reploids needed it as well.

After a moment's consideration, Blues sent a new transfer prompt to X, this time a compressed file containing his decrypted code. Even just comparing the two should help X understand the encryptions, Blues thought, though that was unlikely that that was what he wanted them for.

X's brow furrowed as he continued to scan the code Blues had provided, letting the file for his programming download separately. He'd look over that later, although he was certain that his brother wouldn't approve of him directly downloading anything. '_Blues, I have a question about the program displays. If I set the sensory input to sight, it'd work along the same line as a HUD or peripheral status screen, right?_'

Blues had to think about that for a moment: his own systems were so customized to his tastes that he actually had to dig around for the default settings. X's mind was more human than his, but Doctor Light designed Blues' default: it was designed as something humans would prefer. '_Yes, it should. You'll be able to minimize it to the side, or back to your mind's eye for when you don't want the main status display open_.'

Well, that at least covered that problem, not that it was even much of one. With all the communications that had been required during his time with the Maverick Hunters, X had become quite accustomed to living in a world where only one eye really ever took in the world around him. Sure, they were programmed to be as human as possible, but Reploids did have a particular knack with multitasking their communications.

'_I'm actually familiar with a display system like that, so that won't pose a problem._' His eyes continued to drift across the code; the defensive protocols, the active scan mode that the program would initiate, the…wait, what was that? '_Blues, if there's a section of coding I don't get, how would I go about displaying it to you so you could tell me what it was for?_'

'_You can slip a copy of the section into a new file and send it to me,'_ Blues said; it really was just like sending with computers. _'Or you could flag the section in the main document and send me the altered file.'_ Either way would work just fine.

'_I'd rather we address these as I go. That way, I'm learning the coding _and_ the program at the same time._' He quickly copied the section of code, created a new save file, inserted the data and sent the packet to Blues. '_I don't get it. I already have status monitors for my system, so when I noticed that talking about status queries, I was wondering if there is supposed to be a redundancy in the program._'

Oh, that. _'Ah…that's not in regard to your own status. That's to query the status of whatever…individual you encounter on the network.'_ So that X could tell if they were well and get a read on their systems status so that the program could classify them as an enemy unit if need be.

'_Oh._' X simply took note of how the encryption translated and moved on. Minutes passed in silence before X found another pile of code. '_Before I keep looking over this, Blues, is it alright for me to be keeping you up so late? I don't want to inconvenience you._'

'_Don't worry about it,'_ Blues reiterated. He wasn't being kept up at all. In fact, this counted as productive time in Blues' book and X needed to get this program installed. This was checking something off of Blues' itinerary, which always pleased him. _'I've had ample time to rest, so upsetting my schedule one night won't be a problem.'_

Another section of code was selected, copied, and bounced back to Blues. "Okay, I can't make heads or tails of that."

Blues was quiet again for a few moments, presumably looking over the code. _'This is a protocol that reaches out to other friendly units as support. It'll activate if you find yourself in a…situation you would have a hard time overcoming on your own.'_ It was an SOS beacon, in short. One that was programmed to send without conscious permission by the user. _'This portion deals with the classification of units into subtypes and friendly/foe divisions.'_ There were three subtypes: Robot Master, Android, and Reploid, though Blues expected the Reploid portion to greatly out-populate the other two combined.

'_Well, that helps,_' X admitted. '_I didn't realize that these were separate sections of code._' For all the years he'd spent staring at his own, staring at Zero's, at Axl's, at every Reploid he'd ever worked on…Blues certainly made him feel inept.

'_Okay,_' he said after a moment, '_this whole section here deals with defenses: breaking out of quarantine, cloaking my signal,_' X drifted off, looking at his hands. '_If I'm a data being when I'm on a network, a formed mass of information, how is generating a false signal location going to keep whomever I'm dealing with from seeing me?_'

Blues blinked at X's question, tilting his head slightly as he answered. _'You are a signal on the network. The others recognize you as X because they recognize your source as being you. Your identity is that source. So by creating a false identity, you cloak yourself from others on the net.'_

'_Wait. You…you don't see me?_' Idly, X wondered why no one else had brought this up before, realizing that, as the only Cyber Elf of his particular origin, it was likely no one else understood that X saw himself, in body, on the network.

'_As in you, how you appear in the physical world? No. I've…customized my interface extensively, but I'd hazard that to the Reploids, you just look like a signal. To me? A point of light at your location, with tags identifying you and giving some data on your general status and condition.'_ Blues' interface actually looked a lot like deep space, each network like a cloud of galactic debris, each signal taking on a different look depending on its classification. He found it orderly and soothing, everything in its place.

Well, that explained a lot. '_I guess I figured that people could see me on the net much in the same way as I could see myself._' For a moment, X wondered if the body he saw when he looked down at himself was more a matter of his mind making him perceive a body there.

A bit more time was spent going over the new program, but X could see little wrong with it, little reason for it to remain uninstalled. '_As far as I can tell, I'm good to go for install. I know that this is meant to work while I'm on a network, but will it remain active when I'm offline?_'

'_It goes into a more dormant state when you're not connected, but the scanning capabilities remain on standby regardless,'_ which would allow the program to be quicker to react should there be an emergency. Blues knew that that aspect of the program was edging on the side of paranoia, but he didn't think that was reason enough not to include it. Either way, it wouldn't take a lot of effort for X's systems to support it, so it shouldn't become burdensome.

'_Okay, well, I can't see anything wrong with the code. I hope I didn't make you feel like I wasn't thankful for this because I looked over it first._' X wasn't sure if his brother could tell that he was smiling. '_I'm going to go ahead and set this—_' His voice dropped off suddenly, systems copying a pile of code and sending the copied data back at Blues. '_I'm actually not going to download this to my systems yet. Blues, what the hell is _that_?_' He'd sent the package before he'd even finished his sentence.

Blues smirked when he saw the coding that X sent and didn't keep the almost-smile from his voice on the network. It was out of place in the coding, that was certain, and though he'd hidden it well, it didn't belong. And that was reason enough for X to be on edge over it.

He was honestly glad that X took the time to go over the program and coding, took the time to ask questions before installing it. He'd hoped the android wasn't so blindly trusting to just install whatever, even if the program did originate from another of Doctor Light's creations, and he was pleased and more than a little relieved that he was right.

If he'd been wrong, he'd have needed to take future measures to prove to X that he should always evaluate a new program, a new bit of coding, before adding it to his systems, before allowing it to become part of his being.

'_That is…well, consider it a gift for having the wisdom to examine the coding. I'd hoped you would.'_ Blues sounded pleased, like X passed a test of sorts, and he quickly undid the encryption and bounced the file back to X.

X was a little concerned at finding the coding, but when Blues told him that it served as a reward? He was still a little skeptical, but opened the file anyway.


	11. Sparring Partners

_So, as you all know, there was a nice little cliffhanger at the end of the last chapter, a little hidden file out of place in the program code from Blues. Today, you'll get to see what the Easter egg was as well as see X spar against Blues with the new defense program._

_Combatants ready? Blues versus X, round one, fight!_

_**Disclaimer: **Mega Man and all related characters and information are the property of Capcom Co., Ltd., Akira Kitamura and Keiji Inafune._

* * *

><p>It was a <em>memory file.<em> One of Blues'.

There was a strange filter over the visual portion of it, darkened like sunglasses. A visor? There was a display that had to have been on the visor itself; anything else wouldn't have been included in the memory file, but in the peripheral there was a stream of data, moving too rapidly for the human eye to catch. It seemed to be a message center with a great deal of back-and-forth, though none of the ID numbers were ones X could recognize.

But the scenery was _so green._ There was a copse of trees nearby, heavy with leaves, and the plant life looked healthy in a way that was uncommon even when X was activated in 21XX.

There was a small child with dark hair running up to Blues now, with a robot galumphing after him—a dog? —and the child was holding a soccer ball in both hands, beaming brightly up at Blues. "Do you want to play?" He sounded altogether too excited about the prospect—he'd apparently only been playing with the dog before.

The child wasn't in armor, was in the kind of clothing children wore back in 20XX, but the resemblance to X left no room for question about who this child was.

"Have you been out here by yourself all day?" Blues sounded amused, but the child shook his head vehemently.

"Ice Man was playing with me earlier, but Doctor Light is doing maintenance on him now. He was the only one that came home this time."

"Well, it'd take a lot longer if he took all six at once," Blues pointed out even as he reached down to take the ball from Rock. His hands and arms were covered in red armor, with what looked like a grey material covering what of his body was exposed.

"Yeah…" Rock clearly thought that it was more fun when everyone was home at once, rare as that was. The dog had come right up to Blues, tail wagging, and sniffed at him.

"Rock! Where are you?" A female voice rang out and both Rock and Blues looked up and around: a small, female robot with blonde hair was making her way toward them. "Oh! Blues! Why didn't you send a message?" She asked the question, but her tone and the look on her face indicated that she wasn't at all surprised that he hadn't. That was his way, apparently.

Rather than answering her question, he asked, "Status report?"

She almost rolled her eyes. "We're all _fine._ Oil Man won't be if he doesn't stop making a mess in the lab whenever he repairs anything—I don't know who's worse, him or Auto—but if you're so worried, why don't you just come inside?"

Rock was looking back at Roll now like really, we're having this conversation _again?_

Roll just stared up at Blues, frowning cutely.

"Did you come out to play soccer, too, Roll?" Blues asked, his head tilting slightly as though he couldn't think of any better thing to do on such a sunny day. As though she hadn't just suggested he enter the lab.

Rock smiled and Roll grinned at him, "You'll lose."

Blues didn't say anything back, but by the look on the twins' faces, it was all too obvious that he'd just smirked at them.

* * *

><p>X was speechless. To see this, for his brother, for <em>Blues<em>, to have given him this? Something so personal, something that spoke volumes about a past they both, in their own ways, had shared? The realization had only been tempered by the sorrow that the faces he saw, of a brother and sister he knew he had, were faces he could no longer remember, faces lost to the sands of time and degradation of memory files over centuries.

Part of X was glad that he'd started loading the program to his systems as Blues was sending this memory file over. Had he waited to see what the elder Light sibling had hidden away, he wouldn't have had the sense to start the install process for a good _long_ while.

Blues didn't say anything after that, either. He didn't know if X had known what Rock and Roll even looked like, but he thought that something like this was…appropriate. That X should know where he came from, even if none of those people were able to be around when he finally activated.

Almost out of embarrassment, Blues turned on the network and began monitoring what the security team was doing a bit more closely, almost desperate for a distraction.

Still unable to find words, X queued up the file again, slowing it down so it played at greatly reduced speeds. The information in the peripheral had been nothing but a blur to him, and he was somewhat curious as to what was actually going on in the window.

He hadn't expected it to be a chat window. Or, at least, a close approximation to it.

'_Blues,_' he asked, finally finding something he _could_ talk about, '_doesn't the DWN designation that keeps popping up in the comm peripheral stand for Doctor Wily Number?_'

_'It does,' _Blues responded at length. '_The family lines were all designated in this fashion; my own serial number, DLN-000, is properly said as Doctor Light Number 000.'_

For a moment, X wasn't sure how to respond. Sure, Blues—or Proto Man, as the Wily Numbers had been addressing him—admitted that he was communicating with Wily's creations while visiting his family's house, but nothing in their chatter seemed off-kilter or suspicious; Blues didn't seem the least bit worried about talking to them, about letting them know what was going on at the Light household. It was more like walking in on a friend's chat room than anything else, more like seeing a bunch of children talking to each other. Several of the listed designations had turned the conversation towards the topic of soccer once it had hit the network that Rock had just asked Blues to play, and X froze the file during a string of soccer-related chatter.

He would have asked his question immediately, had the freeze-frame not paused on a clear image of his older brother smiling at Blues. To see that face, as cheerful and innocent as Rock looked…

For a moment, X felt that he was looking not only at his brother, but at himself, had he been younger in appearance, in design, than Doctor Light had made him. It made X feel all the more saddened that, of all those he should have grown up around, all those he should have known, only one had survived long enough to see him, to pass on these memories, single file or not.

'_Who is DWN-019_,' he finally asked, '_and what do they mean by saying that…Forte is going to be sad you didn't invite him?_'

Blues actually chuckled slightly at that, as to a fond memory, though not the one he sent X. _'DWN-019 is Gemini Man. He was…one of the Third Numbers, the third Robot Master set to be produced.'_ So he was one of the older ones. _'Forte is…I suppose you could call him Rock's rival. They were fond of teasing him. I believe he has a colorful retort for them a bit later into the log.'_ Forte was fond of 'colorful' retorts.

It hit X then, looking at the frozen image before him, eyes trailing over the comm chatter. '_These…these are Zero's siblings._' Even with how Zero had been, what he'd made of himself after his discovery… '_You're talking to the Wily Numbers like you've known them for ages, as if they are family. Why do you…_' X wasn't sure what the right way to phrase this was. '_Why are you so comfortable with them, but can't stand being around Zero? If Wily's Robot Masters were like this,_' this amicable despite their creator, '_why is Zero so different to you?_'

'_Doctor Wily was a very sick human,'_ Blues said slowly, _'and his mental health only declined as the years wore on. He lost sight of his original aim long before the Wily Wars ground to a halt. He lost himself long before he began to design the Zero Project. And the Zero Project was…quite unlike any of the others.'_ Memories of a late night in Wily's lab while the human slept, pilfering parts for repair. The Second Numbers never minded when he dropped by and often sat and talked with him. Quick Man had been the first to warn him of this new project, of its intentions, of just how far the father of the Wily Army had fallen. Of just how much his madness had stolen from him.

Blues often wondered if Wily himself died long before the cancer stole him.

'_I guess telling you how he was when we first found him didn't help with whatever you knew from back then,_' X admitted. '_Although you're doing a very good job of dancing around the subject of what the Zero Project actually _entailed_._' A slight smirk there. '_I'm not going to push. You've had enough of a day as it is. I just…I hope that if you do ever run into Zero again, you'll at least give him the benefit of the doubt, even if it's from the other side of the room._'

A soft chime alerted X that the program had completed its installation and was ready for use. A confirmation screen popped up over the visual feed for one eye. '_Blues, should I just click 'Yes' for the program, or is there a way to set the options before I kick it into gear?_'

'_I always thought it easiest to just turn it on and organize from there. You're not in a situation where you're under duress, and I did take your input limits into account with how much it would push you with at the default. I'm the only other unit it will register, so it won't be like turning it on in the full security or communication networks.'_ Blues was fiddling with his own settings as he spoke. _'I am going to appear as a friendly unit to begin with, but I will have to become a threat to you so you'll be able to set that portion of the display to your liking and learn to wield the program.'_ He said it very casually, but it was a warning: this training session would get a bit messy.

'_Okay,_' X responded, authorizing the program to boot up. Almost immediately, there was a flurry of data, some audio, some visual. It took him a minute, but it wasn't long before the visual data had been set to a status window that updated over one eye.

For him, it was like being back with the Hunters, back in the flow of the life he had known.

Well, for the most part. He couldn't begin to place the odd audio feed he was getting.

Blues hung back, just sort of drifted on the network, his focus drifting between data streams even as he kept an eye on X as he booted up the new program and set it to execute. He expected it'd take a few minutes for X to get used to the new input and figure out how he wanted to receive it, so he wasn't about to inundate X with an overflow of information on how to use the program, not yet.

It took a little while for X to adjust the scroll speed and text size for the status window to a comfortable level. While he had no problem reading the data in the small font he set, it had been going either too fast or too slow, and with the data moving erratically now, with only one entity on the net to worry about, only one person there besides him?

'_What in blazes is this audio feed I'm getting?_' he finally asked. '_I swear, it's like humming or white noise, but I can't figure out what it is or what, if anything, it has to do with the program. Did I install something wrong?_'

Humming? _'No, no, that's supposed to be there. It's installed perfectly if that function is translating properly.'_ That was the happiest Blues sounded all day, like that X could even hear that was _a _very, very good thing. _'Though I imagine it's rather…empty with only me here.' _Pity. _'That sound is the Harmony, though it isn't much of one with only one unit.'_ It reminded Blues of when he was still young and innocent, when he was newbuilt and still trusting. _'Try replaying that memory once your video feed isn't cluttered.'_

'_The Harmony?_' X had never heard of such a concept, never known there to be anything like this in all the years he'd been active. '_Blues, that doesn't mean anything to me aside from the dictionary definition of the term._'

'_I apologize, I should have explained that first. The Harmony is a phenomenon that occurs whenever a Robot Master hits a network. It is…not an actual sound, though an audio translation is a good translation since it works so much like music. It is the thrum on the network of the Robot Master's mind and it changes according to what the individual is doing and…depending on their mood. It is an accurate indicator of status.'_ So X would be able to read him much more accurately with this enabled, once he figured out what the sounds meant. _'Were you a Robot Master, you'd be able to feel my contribution to the Harmony as a second mind pressing against yours and a degree of empathetic communication would take place. A great deal, as we are family. Not so much between strangers, next to none between enemies.'_ But X was an android and couldn't experience that due to his mental defenses. Blues himself sometimes set the Harmony to audio input if he wanted something soothing to listen to, and so he'd chosen an audio input for X.

'_So I can learn to translate the Harmony into, what, an emotional understanding, sort of like music? Or will it be different because it's not a language I'm fluent with, that I can't understand it the way you do?_'

'_At the very least, you will learn to read the changes in the Harmony that reflect emotional or status changes, given enough exposure to the individual. We…in my time, there was never anyone but Robot Masters on the network and humans couldn't hear the Harmony, so this is uncharted waters.'_ But he'd seen the opportunity to show this to X and he couldn't not do it, not when it was such an integral portion of how Robot Masters communicated.

X held still on the network for a moment, adjusted the way the audio sounded to him, startled when he tweaked the feed to mimic a harmonica and actually heard _music_, actually heard a tune.

And _wow_ was it catchy.

Blues nodded over the network, watching X adjust himself and settle into the program. A major concern had been overwhelming the android with too much data, but he'd taken care when programming the default settings, was sure to set it well within parameters that wouldn't drown X out.

'_Alright,_' X said finally. '_I think I'm ready to test this._' The only thing that left X perturbed about the whole system was that , with the way Robot Masters managed the network, there wasn't an origin point to trace to, something that had been like meeting someone in a crowded room for Reploids. He could tell from the data scrolling along in his visual feed, however, that his systems were able to identify that there was a presence on the network.

Blues prodded at X's shields then, let X feel how it felt to have another presence poke at him with this defensive program when that other unit wasn't dangerous. _'Anyone who could perceive these shields, this program, would probably inspect them this way. And they're behaving as they should, good.' _The shields sort of shimmered on the network, not quite repelling Blues, but almost tensing at the prodding. A Robot Master would still be able to hide from X here, but they wouldn't be able to ambush him. The shields would sense and react to their strike immediately as though X himself were another Robot Master. Not that that would be an issue with just Blues here, but if someone in this era tried building another…

With no warning, Blues did something to the shield, his sound on the Harmony shifting to something more intimidating as the best description for his action was that he'd really _smacked_ it. There was something after, though, as though he'd planted something onto it and X's peripheral went up in alarm, detailing status as the program shifted and targeted Blues as a hostile unit. The shields strengthened in response to the 'thorns' of trash data he'd thrown at the program to try and confuse it.

As expected, the program reared like an agitated cobra, the shields not at all broken through.

X stepped back at the first sign of attack, allowing the program to run on its own for the most part. He did focus the program towards Blues, towards where the attack had come from, commands rippling over the shield as X remained on the defensive, watching, waiting, and listening. If he could just tell where the attack was coming from, tell before the strike, he should be able to actively counter or deflect it, keep the shield from having to do all the work for him.

He really hoped the program worked that way. If it didn't, he'd have to ask Blues what _that_ line of coding had really meant.

Of course, with a Robot Master being what it was, it was difficult to tell what direction the attack would come from at any given moment. An attacking unit wouldn't manifest themselves like a Reploid or human on the network; that'd be giving away too much of an advantage. One of the main purposes of the program was to defend the android even when he had no idea what just hit him.

Like now.

Now he just had to keep attacking until X figured out how to tell where Blues' self was concentrated. So another smack, this one from below X, like the network itself heaved as though with an earthquake, sending the android careening into another portion of the secured server.

Pushing himself to his feet, X felt the shield bristle around him, felt it as if were a plethora of eyes and ears scouring the server. The strikes were coming in hard, and they were hitting from random locations. With a unit like Blues, it was difficult to tell where he was coming from. Being the network meant that he wasn't constrained like the Reploids, didn't have a signal that could be traced.

But he did have a center of power, a nexus for his control. Moving through the network, X kept the shield steady, watching the flow of data streaming over his eye, slowing the text down only a bit as the readings started to move faster than he could follow. To find him, X couldn't rely solely on the shield, couldn't rely just on insight. He effectively had to split his concentration, watching the data feed scroll by while keeping himself aware of the network around him.

A shift in the reading, and X dropped into a defensive crouch, hoping he'd translated the data properly.

This time, when Blues struck, the shield actually _pushed back._ It wasn't a full deflection, wasn't a full parry, but X did manage to focus and strike back at Blues and it pushed both units apart. Blues' focus coalesced again after a few moments and the sound over the Harmony had an odd sort of trill for a moment. When he spoke, he sounded pleased. _'Very good, you're getting used to how I feel on the network,'_ and thus, better able to focus and target him.

_Good_, X thought, quickly highlighting the changes he'd recorded in the data feed, set the systems to display the text in a different color so that there was a more direct means of tracing when the shift happened. He knew it wouldn't be the same—no one attacked from the exact same vantage point after that point had proven ineffective—so he had to quickly direct the program to look for similar data.

He'd finished setting that command just in time, the text color switching in the feed, and X readied himself. This time, it wouldn't be a simple counter. X intended to _hit back_.

Blues also noticed that X wasn't as reluctant to spar as Rock always had been. The child truly hated fighting, even play-fighting, and would try to talk Blues out of it every time he needed more training. It never worked, of course, and he made sure Rock could defend himself, but if he'd just gotten down to business like X was now, it'd have been over with more quickly.

X was learning quickly, too, so Blues stepped up the ante and this time, when he attacked, it was less of a smack and more of a slice into the shield.

The data had been different, but not enough so that the system couldn't trace it, didn't alert X, and he strengthened the shield near the point where Blues' energy was aiming. Only at the last second did X realize the change in attack, moving deftly to the side even as the shield was hit, and hit _hard_.

This was X's little network security bubble, and like _hell_ anyone was going to pop it like it wasn't even there, wasn't effective, and X reached out with his own power, augmented the shield, and struck out at the energy that was quickly recoiling from his vicinity. Springing back, he ran a diagnostic on the program. The shield was sturdy, had already sealed over where the energy had stabbed into it, and X reinforced that point, almost like putting an extra layer of material over a patched hole. Within seconds, the shield was back up to full strength.

X tensed, recoding the data to a third color for the difference in attack. The faster his systems could identify a source, the quicker he'd be able to respond and the less likely he was to be caught off-guard by a change in attack pattern or method.

Were X built with an animal form rather than a humanoid one, he would have snarled at Blues.

A feeling like approval on the network, even as Blues laid into X again, this time slicing at his bubble in two places, one from the front, one from above. With each attack, Blues pressed more strength into it, pushed X a bit further to force him to adjust and learn. Blues hadn't broken through the bubble yet and while X had been landing counterattacks, Blues didn't appear to be hurt at all. His data stream would just splash back like drops of water, then condense again when he gathered himself up.

X was reacting more like one of the Wilybots, like a robot built for battle, though considering the android's history, that only made sense. He'd likely gotten past the phase where he'd plead for peace, if he even was ever idealistic enough to try it to begin with.

X bounced back, away from the latest barrage of attacks, and focused his energy around him. So far, he'd only been using his own power to amplify the shield, to strengthen his own defenses and move through the shield to attack. From what he could tell of Blues' response, however, the shield was serving as a buffer when X attacked from within.

_So I have to attack from without,_ X realized.

He felt for the shield, felt how far that bubble spread around him, and established where his line of defense ended. Just outside of that, outside of the reach of his defenses, he could raise his own weapons against his opponents. Though by no means tired or severely impacted by the use of his own energy on the shield, X knew that he would not have a lot of time to fight before the taxing of his systems required he either fall back to Cyberspace or end up caged by whatever was fighting him.

Capture, as it had been during the Maverick and Elf Wars, was not an option.

His energy coalesced around the shield, forming into two distinct balls of energy. He would have preferred more, preferred a greater degree of retaliatory capability, but to wield more than two weapons? He was only built with two arms. His control would be clumsy at best, a waste of effort and energy.

Deftly moving aside, Blues' next attack missed, and X lanced out with one of the orbs, the energy morphing into something very similar to Zero's saber. The blade turned only at the last second, X realizing that he had no idea what a straight attack would have done to Blues, much less whatever of himself Blues was using to attack. The blade skimmed along the data stream before recoiling, reforming into a ball of energy just outside the shield.

Blues retaliated immediately in X's moment of hesitation, slamming down on X's shield, causing fractures along the android's defense. _'Don't hesitate to attack,' _Blues admonished, even as his focus skirted up from the redirected attack, letting the energy veer off and dissipate. _'Something like that is costly to you, is it not? Don't waste your arms if you're not going to seriously attack.' _There was an audible frown in Blues' voice. Did X think he'd have actually _hurt_ Blues with that? _'Or did you just assume that I did not have shields of my own?'_

'_You can't fault me for being worried about attacking my own brother. Whether or not you have shields says nothing for the fact that I've never sparred with you before. Zero, yes. Axl, yes. You?_' X lashed out again, this time not holding back as the blade swept towards his brother's data. '_I just needed to know when I have to let up. It's like knowing the phrase or signal to get your trainer or master to let go, to stop._'

That was the second time 'Axl' was mentioned, but Blues didn't ask about it, just amended Axl's designation to 'veteran and sparring partner' in his dictionary of 'people X knows who aren't here', then deftly summoned a shield to intercept X's attack. The blade pushed on the shield and the impact would have sparked had it been in the physical plane. Then Blues pushed the shield a bit up and out, deflecting the blade and sending it spinning upward. _'That's better. Don't worry yourself over me on this plane. While yes, a direct hit would do some damage, you aren't aiming to kill. I can feel that in your attack. I'd recover even if I did sustain damage.'_

That seemed to be just what X needed to get goaded into full sparring mode, the saber still held at the ready for close-quarters offensive strikes. The ball that had been hovering at his left suddenly grew in size, in intensity, before splitting off into two smaller orbs that hovered above X's shields.

He may only have two arms, but that didn't mean X hadn't learned well how to use ranged armament in combat.

As he moved closer to Blues, closer to the nexus where all the attacks were focusing around, the two orbs hovering above him began to glow before firing out missile-like bursts of light, targeting the core—or at least what X hoped was Blues' core on the net—and he dodged another series of attacks, stabbing through the data streams.

An instinctive part of Blues wanted to push his own defensive program into caging X as he'd done to Phantom, to set an example of who had true dominance on this network. Blues vetoed that urge and ran down the line to veto whatever directive set was prompting the urge—the mastering subprogram, no surprise there—and while X rained attacks down on his nexus, on his focus, Blues let it dissolve and coalesce in a different point on the network, though his shields did get slammed by the energy spheres. His shields trembled and shook, as though to shake loose of X's energy (it felt a bit odd), but held fast. He smirked. X was finally taking this seriously. Perhaps he wasn't so different from Rock, after all. Rock had been reluctant to strike at Blues, too.

Blues lanced at X's shields with multiple projectiles, aiming to overwhelm and burst his defensive bubble.

X was aware of what the nexus felt like, what Blues' energy felt like, on the network, and was quickly able to reroute his secondary weapons fire, even as the sword collapsed to reroute his energy to amplifying his shields, to adding outer shields of his own energy that actually counter-attacked the projectiles.

It didn't stop him from falling back as his status screen started drifting towards the yellow, his own energy feeling where the weaknesses in the shield were starting to form, patching them ahead of the program actually repairing itself. A pair of whips sprang up outside the shield, reaching out to bat aside or obliterate the throngs of data bombs that were assailing his system.

X ticked his head to the side, program quickly changing from a small peripheral over one eye to a full visor, data and status images blinking up in a way that made his status easier to track, his defenses simpler to build or repair. Ensuring that he kept his metaphorical back to Blues' nexus, he began to charge a new energy orb, letting the power build until he would be able to use it…if he had a chance to use it, he amended.

Blues' shield sort of undulated as the Robot Master considered X. He could almost see Blues' head tilt, even over the network, as Blues considered his next plan of attack. X was doing well with the personal assaults, but Blues hadn't tried any subjugation techniques. Perhaps that'd be the next thing to work on, though he'd have to start a bit lower: this sensation would likely be uncomfortable to X and he didn't want to cause pain the way he had to Phantom. X hadn't done anything wrong, after all.

So a little bit of pressure, like herding a robot to a desired point. Nothing painful or necessarily scary if you know what it is. Blues' aura pushed on X, not quite pinning him, but restraining him some, limiting his movements and slowing him.

X felt the push, felt himself starting to get backed into a corner, and started shunting all his energy towards the orb building at his back, pressing out with the shield as he tested the barrier of Blues' containment. It wasn't yet a cage, wasn't yet pinning X to the spot, but he felt the walls at the edges of his periphery, knew that Blues was going to quarantine him, much as he had done to Phantom, and he needed to find an out.

Now.

Recoiling back, or as much as he could given the circumstances, X released the orb, the bright ball of energy lancing towards Blues' focus once more.

Blues' immediately reaction was to hit the orb with some of his own power, not at all wanting it anywhere near his nexus. As he did that, he clamped down harder on X, restraining him further, making the pressure a step more severe, though still nowhere near what he'd done to Phantom.

The orb, a split second before impact, shattered into dozens of smaller orbs, blasted apart into a large net of light, before each of the individual little sparks sped towards Blues.

The moment X felt the orb break apart, he pressed outward, reached out, and his energy lashed out with fire and electricity, coursed with power, as he attempted to push against his brother's constricting hold.

Blues reeled in surprise and in that moment, it was like the entire network was trembling, surprised by the blow. His focus, his nexus, seemed to dissipate as his presence felt evenly distributed everywhere. Another tremor, then Blues coalesced again, his shields intact. If they'd been fighting in person, he may have shaken his hand, the one without the Buster, as though he'd just burned his fingers. _'That…was impressive, all considered,'_ Blues acknowledged, though he didn't attack again. He was still holding X, but it didn't have that restrictive feeling that it had before X retaliated. Now, instead, it was like being behind a second set of shields, like a second defense. He scanned X: that had been a _lot_ of energy; did the Cyber Elf need to rest, or was he good for more?

X felt the press of Blues' scan, the request for status information, and he redirected the shield to cut that feed off as best as he could. At the same time, he pulsed his own energy out again, pushed outward against Blues' hold. It wouldn't be enough just to stave off the attack, to hold back the quarantine program.

X had to break free of the prison before the lock clicked shut.

His brother may have had the years and the network control to keep X…

Wait a minute…

Network control.

That was _it_.

Energy pulsed over the shield, reinforced it once more, as the tendrils of power lashing around the barrier X had in place continued to whip out, attack any force that drew too close. Even as he pushed more of his energy into the shield and the data streams defending him, he reached out for the network. Even logged in, Blues was assuming control where X had remained just a passenger in the flow.

No more.

X kicked his admin access fully online, pressing against his brother's hold on two fronts, knowing that the exertion over the net would be carefully masked by Blues. After all, he'd already dealt with the base after presumably attacking one of the legendary Maverick Hunters. To attack their leader? He knew that Blues would not let the base know of this.

Blues dropped the growing prison on X so abruptly that it could have _burned _him. The Robot Master actually shuddered and retreated from where X was on the partitioned network, the equivalent of taking more than just one or two steps back. One thing that Blues did not want was the rest of the base finding out who and what he was, asking questions and pressing him with their suspicions. He hated explaining himself, hated having to walk people through things when it was _none of their business_, though he'd been trying to be patient with X.

But this was a clever strategy, given the situation, and it did effectively cause Blues to drop the trap, even if it wouldn't work on a network where Blues wasn't trying to hide. Had Blues not cared, he'd have locked X and kicked him the way he had Phantom. The way he'd do to any enemy unit that tried to gain unauthorized access on _his _network.

Unauthorized access into _his_ mind.

So Blues hung back warily, slightly unsettled but none the worse for the wear after X's outburst. He drew his shields around himself more tightly than before, spinning and weaving the energy around his being, focusing it around his nexus. X was trying to block any attempt by Blues to check his status, to see how he was doing, and Blues had to remind himself that X wouldn't know Robot Master etiquette, that X would be working by his own experience with sparring. In this situation, X was probably rejecting scans regardless of how they felt. X may not even feel the subtle changes in intention from one to the next.

So instead, Blues fell back to just observing X.

X had been involved in enough training sessions, enough rank and enlistment tests, to know that it was far better now to hang back, build his own defenses, prepare for the next wave, than it was to go in with all guns blazing.

He smirked at the thought, remembering how badly Axl had miscalculated Zero's observation for a fallback maneuver when the rookie had been going for his promotion to General shortly before the Jakob Project incident. Had the young gunner realized that Zero was watching for an opening rather than pulling back to avoid his gunfire, it was very likely that the promotion would have actually been granted that day.

The offensive net that X had placed around him drew closer to the shield, wove into a tight web around him, as the shields were repaired once more, the visor quickly showing all green on the status board. He pulsed fresh energy into the shield, adding a new layer to the defensive shell cocooning around him, and waited.

Behind the visor, his eyes narrowed as he took a calming breath, trying to keep himself steady even as he felt himself start to flicker. He still had more of a fight in him, enough energy to handle a few more rounds, but if Blues just insisted on pushing harder each time the attack renewed?

X really hoped that his brother was the type that allowed a spar to end without one side really having proven themselves over the other. If not? X was going to be digging himself into one seriously deep hole.

Well, Blues mused, X clearly didn't want to play the game where he tries to escape the quarantine program (to many of the Robot Masters, what he and X were doing would have been an _excellent _game), so Blues decided to return to attacking the shields and letting X practice with defending and returning fire. X was just watching him now, was gathering himself and repairing and enforcing his shields, which was a wise move.

Blues began his attack anew as abruptly as the other times, there was not even a sense of him readying his stance, only that at one moment, the Robot Master was observing and the next, there were new projectiles being lobbed at X.

X read the signs, narrowed the trajectories, and the tendrils snapped into action, parrying and blocking the projectiles, doing whatever could be done to keep them from attacking the shield directly. New orbs were flung out, aimed at Blues when he could afford a relatively clear shot, some of the projectiles his brother was hurtling intercepted by cluster bomb orbs that served more as countermeasures than part of a return offensive.

While X was distracted by the rain of projectiles, while he was concentrating on deflecting or impacting them, Blues made his move. He hadn't really been very mobile thus far in the fight. He'd mostly stayed still and attacked X from a distance, at a stationary point. This time, however? Blues rushed X with his nexus directly, his own shield crackling under the strain of the bombs X was using to try and defend and struck X with his own aura, not just with an extension, punching forward to puncture the shield and rip it open.

X hadn't been as prepared as he would have liked, but his systems registered the shift in the nexus the moment it happened, X diverting all his energy to holding the shield together as the energy tendrils hastened to form into weapons. A pair of orbs were flung out, serving as fragmentation grenades right in his brother's path, as he raised his saber once more. The blade struck a moment too late, sensors screaming as the shield started to move into the red faster than X's energy could repair the damage.

If he didn't move…

Behind the shield, X toppled to one knee, reaching out and finding the exit point from the network.

As long as Blues didn't cage him…

X flung himself from the system, his form fractured and shaky, as he collapsed in a rolling heap on Blues' floor. His breathing was ragged, and as he forced his body to stabilize, he tried to push himself up, succeeding only in rolling onto his back. His body fractured again, coalescing and calming, though X figured he was showing up a lot more ghostly and transparent than he wanted, especially in front of his brother.

"I'm sorry," he coughed out, looking over to his brother's bed. "I should have stayed, should have…" He tried raising his head, realized how heavy it felt, and laid it back down on the floor. He was thankful he was still stable enough not to start sinking into the floor.

Blues stood from the bed and knelt beside X in one fluid motion, frowning in a way that was quickly becoming recognizable as his 'worried' face. "Don't apologize. I should have asked you if you had the energy to continue. The point…wasn't to best me. I didn't expect you to win, not your first time around. Not when you are still so unwieldy with the program. You did well, very well." Something that could have been a smile might have graced Blues' face had his face not turned to neutral immediately.

"Can't complain…that you didn't know. I shut down your scanning ability. You wouldn't have known." He smiled, even though he could feel how low his energy levels were. "You spar differently than a Reploid. I guess…I guess I should have made it clear that we don't allow scans because it allows a unit to see what systems, if any, are edging towards red and specifically target them." He took a deep breath, allowing himself to go a little more transparent in order to fully stabilize his form. "So, I'm fairly certain I missed something. You didn't seem too pleased with my efforts against the quarantine."

"To us, sparring is a _game._ It is _play._ It is an exchange, a serious learning experience, but if it's sparring and not a real fight? We scan one another to know when to stop. As for the quarantine…well, that was a…viable tactic, given the situation, but it wasn't…an effective strategy on the whole." Not to mention that by Robot Master terms, by the rules of the game, X totally _cheated._ "X, consider for a moment that I did not care whether the security team or the rest of the base knew I was here. Consider for a moment that I decided that on the whole, them knowing did not matter. Consider that it did not matter because I could have _quarantined them all_. You would have pulled bystanders into the fight and given me more weapons to fight you with." Blues wasn't even winded by the match, though he'd settled to sit cross-legged on the floor, his back against the bed.

"If claiming administrative rights doesn't work, then what kind of hope do I have to break out of quarantine? Everything I did just pushed you back, gave me _maybe_ enough room that I could find an exit point, but to hold off the quarantine without stopping it? I don't stand a chance if the first thing done to me is containment. I can't shut that down the same way I can deflect direct attacks against myself and the shield."

Blues nodded, "We'll have to practice again. I won't lock you severely, not when you haven't figured out how to break it." Blues thought it was something best experienced, that experience was the best way to learn. And if X could learn in a controlled environment, all the better. "I think you should rest, though. It…next time, let me see it when it's time to stop." So Blues wouldn't just keep attacking while X became exhausted.

X smiled and nodded. "Any chance I did good enough to earn a hint about _how_ I address the caging before I go?"

Blues actually did smile this time, but didn't respond. No, Blues would rather see how X approached problems, how he tried solving them.

A shrug this time. "Ah, well," he said, closing his eyes. "I'll see you tomorrow, Blues. Get some rest. Goodness knows we both need it." He let out a stuttering sigh, his form dissipating as he merged with Cyberspace to rest and restore his energy.

* * *

><p>It took several days, but Blues eventually ran out of parts. He'd worked on Rock off and on over those days, whenever he was entitled to a span of 'private' time, usually when they assumed he was sleeping and charging. It never even occurred to him to correct X's assumption that Robot Masters need sleep. The box under his bed was now a box full of old, worn parts wrapped in cloth. He needed the proper opening to have some Hoppiders dispose of it for him. Until then, it was taking up prime real estate under Blues' bed.<p>

The bundle, a now mostly-repaired Rock, remained securely wrapped, usually topped with his trench coat. It was an added deterrent. He knew that humans were very territorial about their bedrooms, which was their most personal space, and so placing a personal object on a curious object in one's bedroom would deter visitors from poking at it. Not that Blues had any visitors aside from X, who couldn't pick anything up, but that wasn't the point. It should work the same way for Reploids either way.

A feeling of approval came over Blues when he ran a current through Rock's core to check the child's systems and the physical components returned with all green.

Now he just had to do something about Rock's outermost layer.


	12. Maverick

_ Today, we turn our attention from the Resistance in order to return to the sanctuary of the Eden Dome. The city has been recovering, the youngest of X's children implements a twisted little plan, and the military is left reeling in the wake of what that plan entails._  
><em> We also discover that Blues is not the only one that tries to move without drawing attention as the newbuilt confronts the legend.<em>  
><em> Disclaimer: Mega Man and all related characters and information are the property of Capcom Co., Ltd., Akira Kitamura and Keiji Inafune.<em>

* * *

><p>Four days.<p>

It took them _four days_ to get his city back to order.

Copy X balled his fists, resting them against the rail that ran the circumference of the aerial deck of Neo Arcadia Tower. From this vantage point, he could see out to the edge of the biodome that contained his city, saw the last remnant of the world sprawled out beneath him. He could see the power plant, marveled at the fact that for all her troubles, the building looked as if there was not a problem in the world. He could see the industrial plant that lay just outside the city borders, wondered how many Pantheons still remained in the building, locked in small holding cells, awaiting their retirements. Behind him rose the towering remains of a structure from an age long past, a migratory elevator that had fallen to ruins during the Elf Wars, hiding a great secret within its secured chambers.

Pantheon patrols had once again taken to the streets, though Copy X had, on Judge Mantisk's suggestion, had several of the units remove their weapon upgrades, returning the units to their original classifications as Pantheon Watchers. The units who remained on reserve, held within response stations as long as the alarms remained silent, were the only ones to retain their weaponry. Three-quarters of the Golem forces were placed into temporary stasis, a move suggested by Judge Kelverian, to help lower the chances that any responding Golems would present a smaller threat to their own people if another attack were to occur.

"Master X," a voice behind him asked, and Copy X turned to find Phantom on one knee, head bowed.

"I'm surprised to see you here, Phantom," Copy X said. "You were assigned to another project that demands your attention."

Phantom nodded, rising to his feet. "I was, Master X, but there were other matters that I had been looking into prior to those orders, matters that may prove far more important to the safety of our city. As such, I assigned Tech Kraken to serve in my stead. Forgive me if I have upset you, Master X, but the work I have done could not wait."

"And tell me, Phantom, what could be of greater importance to the security of our city?"

"Finding the Resistance," he answered truthfully, "and stopping their efforts against your great city."

Copy X actually smiled at this. "You found something, then? Something the rest of the crews missed?"

"I have, Master X, but I would rather this be discussed before the Judges."

A tremor of worry shot though Copy X, but he stilled, settling himself. "Only new assignments require the counsel of the Judges before implementation." He quickly messaged the Judges, asking each how soon they could convene for a session. "Very well," he told Phantom after a moment, "I will grant you a session before the Judges. They'll be in the Council Chamber in twenty minutes."

* * *

><p>Phantom bowed as he entered the Judge's chamber, turning to Foxtar as he stood. "I take the lack of communications with me as indication that Tech Kraken is serving his position well?"<p>

"He is," Foxtar replied. "We were able to select the units for the task force yesterday, and he is currently supervising them as they review the code, although we were surprised to find that all the faulty units were traced back to only seven programmers."

Mantisk nodded in approval. "All the better that the numbers are low. Already there has been too great a waste of life in this city. To continue blindly would only serve to hurt us further."

The Judges were unaware that Copy X had, only four hours prior, seen the seven names listed for the Pantheon and Golem programming and the two for the alarm system. When that information had landed in his lap, the Reploid had done the only thing that he had felt appropriate—he ordered the retirement of all nine units, effective immediately. He had been careful, however, ensuring that his orders were passed on to a unit he could trust would remain silent about their actions.

"You come before us," Kelverian stated, "with talk of the Resistance." His head ticked a bit to one side. "Pray tell, what have you found, Guardian Phantom, and what do you plan to do with this information?"

"I felt it was necessitated that I search the lab and passageways beneath Sub Arcadia," he said, "and found an old Trans Server unit that had logged a single use in the timeframe of the Resistance's attack and the city power outage. I accessed the system's databank for the coordinates logged for that jump and was able to get the information. However, it seems as if the hacker had meant to cover their tracks. I only had a second or two before the system deleted the log in its entirety. I have not been able to restore the system or the information."

"But you say you have coordinates?" Flizard said. "That is very good."

Phantom nodded. "The reason that I asked Master X to call this session was to inform you of my intentions and to get your permission to begin an undercover operation. I intend to, under the pretense that I have been marked with an Order of Retirement, infiltrate their ranks and aid this city in destroying their organization from the inside out. We cannot continue to allow their insurgency to continue, especially in the wake of an attack that killed so many."

"Interesting," Inarabitta said, sitting up at the mention of Phantom's cover, "though I see no reason to have you mark yourself as Maverick. It seems like a simple cover, nothing that will mean much to the city."

Foxtar smiled, cutting off Phantom's reply. "No, Inarabitta, no. This is no simple cover. The Resistance is well-known for evacuating Reploids marked as Maverick. To say that he has been labeled as such and then escaped the city is to provide the perfect reason for the Resistance to trust him. They take all who have been marked for retirement." He leaned back, resting the fingers of one hand against his forehead as he tried (and failed) to restrain a laugh. "To think that we have dealt with their foolishness for so long and not yet thought to send an agent into their ranks. And now, to send a _Guardian_?"

"To see the city willing to mark one of the city's highest, to mark the _Zan'ei General_, as Maverick?" He turned to face Copy X. "This does require a great deal of support from the city, as I need official orders for my retirement placed into the city databanks. Should their hacker seek to confirm my claim, and I am certain they will, I need what I say to be substantiated by the city."

"What would you desire as a reason for your retirement?" Le Cactank asked. "There are very few things that would be reasonable for a Guardian to be dubbed as such, little that would sound legitimate to anyone that knows our system."

Phantom closed his eyes, bowing his head. He did not want to use this, did not want to break the silence so long secured between he and the copy sitting in his father's place.

He had no choice.

"I may be sealing my true fate with this," he said, standing tall as he addressed the council, his voice almost echoing in the chamber. "I intercepted the transmissions from the task force last night, the list of those found to be responsible for the issues with the emergency response. When I realized there were only nine responsible," and he could already see the fear of what he was about to say mounting in the eyes of at least three of the Judges, as well as a glimmer of worry in the eyes of the monster that had assigned him to the task, "I felt that the number was low enough to constitute my actions. All nine have been retired."

Mantisk was on his feet before Phantom could finish his admission. "To act as such undermines the very core of our government, of the way our society is meant to operate!"

Schilt cut in, mocking Mantisk's reaction with a few short, sharp claps. "I actually commend the action. Nine is reasonable. Nine serves as a strong example to the others."

Flizard bristled. "I hate to admit it, but I agree with Schilt. Nine was a lot less than any of us would have expected, considering how many we make responsible for the programming. To think that only nine were part of the coding team for those that responded as they did." He looked at Phantom. "It would be more appropriate for you to be rewarded for this action than deemed Maverick."

"He acted without approval of the council, without any orders save his own, and has made the task force we set to create completely useless!" Mantisk glared at the Guardian. "How did you come to such a conclusion, judge by yourself, that they were meant for death?"

_Keep your mouth shut about your orders, Phantom,_ Copy X thought, glaring at the Reploid.

"Think of how many died that day, Mantisk. Think of how much human blood ran on _our_ streets because the programmers failed at their duties, failed to ensure that the humans would be kept _safe_. To know that something could be done, that an example could be set without heavily impacting our own numbers, I could not ignore that. Besides," he said, turning to look at Foxtar, "the members of the task force are exceedingly skilled programmers, and they will be given time to go over the coding, find out what was wrong with the units. Once they are aware, once they determine what of the programming was faulty? They can be reassigned to Pantheon programming."

Foxtar nodded, though the look in his eyes indicated that he was not overtly pleased with Phantom's decision.

Copy X leaned back in his chair. "So, we at least have a basis for your retirement orders. What, then, are your plans for getting out to the Resistance and reporting back to us?"

"As far as I am aware, it would be far too dangerous for me to use the Trans Server coordinates that I have because transferring right into the base would get me retired long before I had a chance to explain myself. My best bet would probably be to approach on the surface, so I'll be leaving the city on my own. I know the back ways out of the city, which means I can avoid encounters with any of the patrols, and if I am given at least thirty minutes I can inform the remainder of the Zan'ei the truth behind the order." His troops, unlike most of Neo Arcadia's army, were experts at navigating around the city, and if Phantom was to be found? He wouldn't make it out of the city alive. "As for reporting in, if it meets with your approval, Master X, and the approval of the council, to maintain my cover, my reports will only be in when I can afford to send a secure message packet to one of my lieutenants."

"You think that they will be so quick to trust?" Foxtar sounded incredulous at this assumption.

"I have no intentions of making them think otherwise. Given time, they may request my assistance if they look to reenter the city for their rescue missions, which would give me ample time to send an untraceable message to either Tech Kraken or Hyleg Ourobockle." Even if the message contents would be laced with lies and verified for sending by the Resistance.

"You run a great risk doing what you plan here," Kelverian noted. "You risk death at the hands of the city, of the Resistance, and of your own folly at attempting this." He had, by now, linked into the network and validated Phantom's claims regarding the programmers. "To act against the judgment of the city, to retire units who were, until today, charged only with the failure to properly program the city's security force? While it is understandable that punishment should be meted out against those who deserve it, you are not above reproach. When you return from this mission, should you survive, you will be held accountable and tried for your crimes."

"And I intend to answer for what I have done when I return to Neo Arcadia." Phantom had been surprised to hear the slight changes in Judge Kelverian's voice, knowing that his thought circuits had shifted by the quick changes in his focus unmarked by the trademark tic that had been a side effect of implanting the additional circuits

Copy X nodded. "We are placing our trust in you, Phantom, to allow you on this mission. If the Judges vote with me to permit this endeavor, you will have thirty minutes to alert your troops and to leave this city." He turned to the Judges. "Your votes?"

"For us to be taking the fight to the Resistance, to use our own to bring down the biggest threat to the city? Phantom has my permission," Flizard said.

Schilt nodded. "If they have hackers capable of taking this city down as they did, we need to address the problem."

Le Cactank nodded at Phantom. "I wish you well on this, Guardian Phantom."

Foxtar shook his head. "While I approve of the assignment we are putting you on, Phantom, I honestly wish you had found a different way to convince us."

"I agree with Foxtar that there should have been another way, but I too put my vote forward to grant you this," Inarabitta said, leaning back in his seat.

Volteel turned to Inarabitta. "There are those of us who believe that Phantom has crossed a line with his actions, but that will be a matter addressed when he returns to the city. Phantom, I support this assignment."

Kelverian nodded. "Consensus has been reached. Phantom, you have my support as well."

Mantisk sighed, resting his head in his hands. "I cast this vote and unite the Council, but I also second Judge Foxtar's assessment. You should have found another way to bring your point, to impress upon us that marking you as Maverick was a necessary step."

Phantom bowed again, looking to Copy X as he stood once more. "Thirty minutes it is, Master X."

He was out the door before Copy X even had a chance to formally dismiss him.

* * *

><p>"I do not have time to explain my actions in detail," Phantom said to Phoenix Magnion, the Zan'ei lieutenant close by his commander as they bolted through Sub Arcadia. "In less than twenty minutes, an order will be issued by the Neo Arcadian Council marking me as a Maverick and ordering my immediate termination. The charge will be insubordination for the retirement of nine Reploid units without direct orders. I need you to inform the rest of the army that this order is false and that no actions are to be taken by any of the troops."<p>

"I am shocked to hear you say this," the firebird commented, "but I assume there is reason."

"Infiltrating the Resistance," _in order to join them and be reunited with my father_, "for the future of our city."

"I wish you safe passage and a successful mission," Phoenix said, "and will relay these orders." With a quick salute, the Mythos Reploid shot down another passageway, aiming for the surface to pass the information on to the rest of the Zan'ei.

Phantom turned down another passage, one that led beneath Sub Arcadia and to his escape point from this nightmare city. Dropping through access tunnels and dashing along the cavernous hallways that threaded through the underbelly of the city, he began to slow, stopping before a nondescript door and rapped his knuckles against it rhythmically, tapping out the code sequence he'd provided.

A moment later, the response tap sounded and Phantom opened the door.

Nine pairs of Reploid eyes turned to him.

"Let's go," Phantom ordered. He had to move slower now; the group of programmers behind him did not have his speed capabilities, and he would not risk leaving any one of them behind.

Not in that travesty the insane copy still proclaimed was the haven of their races.

"We will be reaching the outer edge of the Eden Dome momentarily. Even though the network access for Neo Arcadia is severely limited outside of the dome because of the shielding effect, I need you to keep all your wireless systems off. Don't even use them to connect to private short-range comm lines between you. I don't want to risk anyone looking for us and realizing that I'm not going towards the coordinates I gave Phoenix." To keep Neo Arcadia from launching an all-out offensive against the Resistance, Phantom had gone satellite-hopping on the network, quickly finding another building out in the desert. This was, by all accounts, abandoned, further out from the city than the true base, and in practically the opposite direction. "If my calculations are right, we should be out of Neo Arcadian scanning range in approximately seven hours, but we need to keep moving." There hadn't been an option to use a charger, not with the city keeping track of that information, so he hoped that none of the nine were running low on energy.

"How long will it take us to reach safety? The base where you're taking us…how long will we be traveling?"

Phantom sighed softly, pushing a door open. "It's going to take a good four days. If any of you are running low on power, let me know now. I can't offer anything much, but if it gets to the point where we have people falling behind, I want all non-essential secondary and tertiary system functions set to hibernate. If it gets worse past that, I have a cable on hand that I can use to provide a low-level charge from my own system." Phantom had enough sense to fully charge before meeting with the Judges. He knew there wouldn't be much time between the meeting and his 'escape', and he had others to take care of on the trip.

Reaching up, his fingers caressed the pocket on his vest that still carried the trio of blonde hairs.

As the Reploids moved through the doorway, Phantom bowed his head. "Farewell, Neo Arcadia. I leave you now as a Maverick that is seen as only deserving death. I will return with your saviors and raise you back to the glory you once held under the command of my father."

The door slid shut quietly behind him as he departed.

* * *

><p>Harpuia was resting on the ledge of one of the residential buildings, listening idly to the communications chatter within the city, when an alert popped up in his peripheral. Opening the message, his eyes went wide at the information contained within.<p>

It…it couldn't be true.

Of all the insane orders that had been passed, the laws and regulations that caged and destroyed the Reploids of Neo Arcadia…

Harpuia felt his stomach lurch, felt absolutely sickened, by the sight of his brother's retirement orders.

Master X and the Judges had just ordered Phantom _executed_ for crimes against the city.

Of all the Reploids in the city, his baby brother had just been sentenced to death on an insubordination charge.

Linking into the communications array, Harpuia frantically searched the access signals for his sister, finally stumbling across her somewhere along the Pacific relay. '_Levi, tell me that's a faulty order. Somebody's just messing with the system. That order _cannot_ have been passed down by the Council._'

The incoming message from Harpuia didn't wait in Leviathan's queue for even a moment. She closed one eye when she opened the channel, listening boredly, but once she heard Harpuia's question, her eyes shot wide open. He'd forwarded an Order of Retirement document to her. _Phantom's_ retirement order. She looked it over quickly, her brow furrowing in concern, confusion, and no small amount of panic. _'Insubordination? Phantom? Are they _insane_?'_

After a few moments, confirmation came to the General of the Meikai Army. _'Harpy, these are legitimate.'_ X, their father, their _father,_ had sentenced Phantom, their baby brother, to death? For insubordination, for retiring the Reploids awaiting judgment by the council? And the Judges approved the order_? 'They say that he's not been captured, that he's on the run. Harpuia…if we see him…'_ If they see him, if they ever encounter him again, they were obligated to carry out his retirement.

They'd have to kill him.

'_Levi…_' Harpuia fell silent, launching himself upward along the building and landing on the roof deck, thankful that no one was walking around. No one needed to see the Rekku General this close to tears. '_Levi, how do they expect us to kill our baby brother? How can they…how could Father see what he did and deem him Maverick? It's not the first time he's carried out assassinations against those who have been found at fault by the city, so what's so different now?_' It sung all sorts of wrong in Harpuia's mind that their own father could have condemned the youngest of them to death for simply carrying out the duties assigned to him, duties that were part of the oath they all had made to the city decades before.

'_Something's changed in Neo Arcadia,'_ changed ever since that power outage_. 'Phantom's been asked to perform assassinations before, but they wouldn't put this through as a ruse and fail to inform us. It's not…he's not a Maverick. We know that. Something's happened.'_ And of course, their intelligence officer was the one offed. _'If I return to Neo Arcadia, if they realize I'm trying to snoop around…I can't be surreptitious that way, it's too out of place.'_ But something had to be done, there had to be something she could do.

Any comment Harpuia may have had was cut off as a communications request popped up in Harpuia's peripheral, and he established the link immediately upon seeing the sender. '_Fefnir?_' he asked, linking the conversation through to Leviathan, establishing a private comm line for them.

'_Anybody care to tell me what the fuck is going on in the Tower? Who the hell had a faulty enough processor to allow this bullshit to hit the net?_' Fefnir's voice was full of rage, and both his siblings figured that he was raging at a wall or some unfortunate Pantheon, wherever he was. '_Who the fuck would have authorized this? The Judges…Father would have never let this shit go through!_'

'_Levi and I were just discussing that,_' Harpuia informed him. '_And I honestly don't know what to say, Levi. At this point, it's going to be hard to get on the net and actually look around without rousing suspicion. More so since the Zan'ei are likely already aware of this order. They'll take it as a personal affront that they've been under the command of a Maverick,_' even if the three of them knew he couldn't possibly be, '_and too much prying risks marking any of us for…_' Harpuia had to stop, forcibly offlining his vocal program to keep from making a sound as the tears started to fall.

'_I don't care what the city says!_' Fefnir raged across the comm. '_I am not going to retire my brother! Mark me Maverick as well! I don't give a damn about our 'orders', you do _not_ make me attack family!_'

A sickening wave of guilt passed through Leviathan, _'To think that it takes a family member to get us so roused, when…'_ When Reploids being marked as Maverick and killed when they were innocent had become so commonplace. When they'd been turning a blind eye to it the entire time. Until now, until here, when it got personal. And what were they to do? To disregard the order was to be marked as Maverick and hunted. To obey it? She may as well become a Maverick, the action was _the same._

'_So what are we supposed to _do_?_'

'_I don't know, Fefnir. And I know it's not right, Levi. None of what we've been doing for the past few years is right, but until something can be done, we fighting to save ourselves from the inevitable. This city is crumbling beneath our feet and—_"

'_This city is falling apart from under us, and yet the ones at the top are the ones that should be marked as Maverick!_'

Harpuia honestly hoped that none of the Zan'ei had wormed their way onto the comm line at hearing Fefnir's condemnation.

'_**Fefnir**__. Stay your tongue, our father is_ _**not**_ _a Maverick!'_ Leviathan changed trajectory in the ocean, swimming a bit haphazardly to vent her frustrations, her grip on her ranseur tightening. They were just as angry as he was, and even if he said it, she knew that part of her was thinking it, too, except that Father was immune to the Maverick virus, was immune to reprogramming. He was a _good _person, she knew this, so why was this happening?

'_Don't tell me to shut up! You know damn well I'm right. Ever since the power plant started having issues, ever since the fucking scout team brought Dark Elf back into Neo Arca—_' Fefnir stopped cold at the thought.

'_No. Father is immune to reprogramming, is immune to the virus, and never was adversely impacted during the Elf Wars. If the Dark Elf was able to do something, something would have happened far before she was brought back.'_ Leviathan shook her head vehemently, pausing in the water to gather herself and her composure; there were Meikai units not far out and she didn't want to seem upset in front of them.

'_Levi's right, Fefnir,_' Harpuia said, nodding despite the fact they couldn't see that he had. '_Even if something had happened, Father spent eight months running diagnostics and systems maintenance checks after they'd sealed Dark Elf. When he was released from the medical ward, he seemed no different to me, continued on as if he hadn't lost two-thirds of a year._'

Fefnir actually surprised himself a little as a laugh slipped past his lips. '_Says something about Father if it takes a full diagnostic nearly a year to run._'

Harpuia was almost sure he could _feel_ Leviathan glaring at Fefnir across their link. He knew he was.

'_Fefnir, unlike your empty processor, Father actually has a lot of data stored. A full diagnostics would take a long time after several __**centuries**__ active.'_ If she wasn't glaring at Fefnir through the link before, she was intent on withering him over the network now. _'Someone needs to talk to Father,'_ Leviathan said flatly and by her tone, it was clear that she'd vetoed Fefnir from doing it. She'd veto him from even _speaking_ right now if she could.

'_Where do I even begin, Levi?_' Harpuia asked. For being the eldest of the four, it certainly helped to have a female among their ranks. Somehow, even despite her being younger, she was always the one they had turned to for advice. '_I don't want to tell Father that the Council needs to rethink their orders because of the risk that runs, but I can't just…_' He bristled, the wing crests of his helmet whirring slightly as they shifted position, pulling down and closer to the main body of his helmet. '_I'll talk to him,_' he finally said, pushing himself to his feet as he took to the air. '_Perhaps there is more to this than what can be sent across the network._'

'_I still say they all need their heads examined,_' Fefnir commented before severing the connection. He'd had enough of Leviathan being a bossy older sister. Five months and some change didn't give her a right to be so snippy at him.

Leviathan put a hand to her forehead, closing her eyes in irritation, _'It's a wonder that Fefnir isn't the youngest of us.'_ Phantom was always so much more level-headed, more mature. _'Harpy, just…just go there to talk to him. I know you're smart enough not to take up Fef's pedestal and sling accusations. Perhaps you're right, perhaps we haven't heard the whole story. We are owed that much when it is our brother, owed that much when we are being asked to retire him.'_

'_I'll do what I can, Levi. I'll let you know as soon as Father and I are done talking._'

Leviathan nodded, then shifted and resumed her patrol, forcing herself to resume her normal pacing despite her agitation. _'You are speaking for all three of us, you won't stand alone,'_ she promised before cutting the comm and diving deeper.

* * *

><p>Harpuia circled around the spiraling tower of Sanctum Yggdrasil, the core of their city built around a memory of his father, before coming in for a landing on the cruiser pad of Neo Arcadia Tower. The sentries posted near the doorway bowed to Harpuia as he walked past, the Rekku General saluting them as he moved into the building and toward the lift. A wireless burst to the lift starting the car on its ascent, and Harpuia waited in silence, his mind spinning with a thousand questions, each one leading back to the thought that his brother—his <em>baby brother<em>—had been ordered retired by the Council and their father.

A soft chime alerted the green-armored Reploid to the arrival of the lift car, and he stepped on, signaling for Master X's floor and locking the lift down to prevent any other passengers from joining him on the ride.

Occasionally, being the son of the ruler of the city had its advantages.

Reaching the desired floor, Harpuia stepped out, moving towards the door, stopping and dropping to one knee just outside of the threat range of the Zan'ei assassins posted at the door. A bit of surprise at their presence, seeing as their commander had just been labeled an enemy of the state, but Harpuia shrugged it off. The actions of one, even one as close to Master X as Phantom had been, should not reflect poorly upon his troops, nor should it affect the security posting that kept the android safe in these troubling times

One of the guards reached out, tapping his hand against the door. _'Master X,'_ he sent,_ 'you have a guest.'_

_'Who is it?'_ Copy X answered.

_ 'Guardian Sage Harpuia.'_

_ 'Let him in,'_ Copy X instructed, pushing himself from his computer terminal. This meeting should have been expected, should have been a reasonable response to Phantom's retirement order, and yet the copy found himself unable to voice anything about the matter.

"Master X," Harpuia said, bowing as the door closed behind him. "I wish to speak with you."

"I take your urgency as a sign this visit is in regards to the retirement order that was sent out a short while ago."

"Yes," Harpuia said, feeling himself deflate a little at the cold tone with which the comment had been uttered. "I…I fear that the order has…has caused a conflict of interest, and I wish to know if there is more to this than what is being broadcast on the network."

"A conflict of interest?" Copy X said, eyeing the Reploid. "I hope nothing so drastic as your tone would imply."

"Of course not, Master X," came the Guardian's reply. "I just wish to know…I want to know why…how…an order could be passed down to retire my own brother." Harpuia forced himself not to cry. He'd have time enough for that later, once he'd retired to his own chambers and the pod awaiting him. There, the full weight of today's events would have all the time they needed to sink in. "I don't understand how you could…how you and the Council could see fit to retire your son. Father, please…" help me make this make sense.

Copy X had to hold himself steady, keep from flinching at the patriarchal title that the Guardians occasionally used. He had known from a very early point in his activation that the four units that served directly under him were actually the children of the android that had built the city. Each of them had been built using portions of X's data and fragments of battle protocols on top of personality programming that the real X had played a very large part in developing and designing. "Is it truly that difficult to understand a retirement order?"

"It is difficult to understand when Phantom has been on assassination missions before. It's not the first time his stealth skills had been put to use as such, but to see him marked as Maverick?"

Copy X sighed. "Harpuia, I can understand where your concern is coming from, but you have to realize that there was more to this than your brother simply carrying out a retirement order. The investigation had only just started, and Phantom got his hands on the list of names, the list of those responsible for the glitchy programming. He didn't wait for authorization or orders, but instead took it upon himself to mete out judgment. I…I cannot say that it was comfortable for me, that it was easy, to authorize the order, but we were not planning on retiring them all. Not all of the nine were supposed to end up dead."

"But that still leaves me wondering how that constitutes Maverick. He's not attacked a human. He hadn't drawn his weapons against those undeserving or truly innocent. I can understand the concern that he…that he has done this…but to kill him?"

"We cannot risk there being rogue units among out numbers any longer, Harpuia. At this point, it is too dangerous, too much of a risk, even for one as high in the ranks as Phantom was. Perhaps even more of a risk," he said, staring at Harpuia, "because he is so powerful and because he is so good at doing what he does."

"But he's our brother, your son. Father, how can you condemn your own child?"

"You act as if it is possible to deny this order, possible to ignore it, but are you willing to sacrifice your city, your people, your _own_ life, for him? Would you risk him continuing to act on his own recognizance, killing at whim when someone crosses the city? Harpuia, _think_. I know that this hurts, but there is something different in Phantom now. Something's changed. Yes, he's carried out assassination orders before, but he's never done that without someone telling him who and where to strike. He's never acted upon his own judgment. Can we risk having a loose cannon like that in the city?" Copy X walked to Harpuia, resting his hands on the Guardian's shoulders. "I know it a great deal to ask of you, of all three of you, to do this, but you must understand. I am not going to risk this city for the sake of one Reploid, even if it _is_ Phantom. The rest of the world out there, beneath the canopy of the Eden Dome, needs me to be strong and ensure their safety. They need my remaining Guardians to be resilient and perform as well as they can, even though the duty that has fallen upon them is one such as this order."

Harpuia was fighting down the urge to cry, to scream at his father, to tell him that it was _impossible_ that Phantom, out of the millions living in the city, had gone Maverick. His hands clenched at his sides, his wing crests folding down to the sides of his helmet. "I…can't…I can't kill my baby brother."

Copy X trembled slightly at the way the eldest Guardian's voice was beginning to break, and despite the fact that he had no true ties to this unit, no connection save for being the leader of the city, Copy X moved forward, wrapping his arms around the Rekku General, offering a hug of support. "I am not happy with the decision that was made, but things have to be done for the sake of our city. I will at least allow you the room to not pursue in this case. Unless he returns to the city, unless he dares to walk back in after running away and refusing to face his sentence, only then will it be required of you to act upon that Order of Retirement. Otherwise, you will not be required to hunt him down. That is the only acquiescence I can make."

"What of Leviathan?" Harpuia asked, returning the hug. "What of Levi, Father, who remains outside the sanctuary walls of this city?"

Copy X sighed, released the Wind Guardian, and shook his head. "I am sorry, Harpuia, but she does not have the same liberty with this order as do you and Fefnir. If she chances upon him, she will be required to act on the order."

Disbelief, anger, fear, and a sick sinking feeling swept over the Guardian, and he bowed, quickly withdrawing from the chamber. He bolted for the lift, moving down through the levels as fast as he could, establishing a new connection with his siblings, as he moved for his own chambers in the tower. Once behind the locked doors of his room, soundproofed as they were, he wailed out his frustration, arm snapping out and denting the metal wall as he punched it.

'_I take it things didn't go so well,_' Fefnir noted. '_The order's legit and there's nothing we can do, is there?_'

'_The only thing we can do, Fef, is wait and pray that Phantom never returns to the city. Unless he does, we are free of the hunt and pursue orders. That was the only thing Father offered in terms of consolation for this._'

'_Save for myself, who travels outside of Neo Arcadia,'_ it wasn't even a question. Leviathan was half-expecting this, sick as it was. She, out of all four Guardians, was least often inside the city proper due to her tendency to dislike dry land_. 'So if I see little Phantom, I will be obligated to retire him regardless.'_ She sighed, a weary, mournful sound. _'I pray that he avoids the ocean, then.'_ She felt tired suddenly, like a sickening weight had just been placed on her shoulders, a heavy burden that would follow her for the rest of her days. Her baby brother, their baby brother, and the best they could do now was pray desperately that they never see him again.

* * *

><p>Opening the door of his chambers slowly, Copy X stepped out, not even bothering to take notice of the guards as he moved for the other end of the corridor. The lift had opened just as Copy X arrived, the leader of Neo Arcadia sighing as the lift doors slid shut behind him, drooping a bit against the wall. The signal was sent to start his descent, and the crimson-eyed Reploid rubbed one hand over his face, hand resting against his mouth for a moment as he let out an exasperated breath.<p>

He'd asked himself the same question countless times before, almost sure that each time this query had bubbled to the forefront of his thoughts it had been in relation to another point of failure, another error in his rule. For only three to know the truth, and he the only remaining one in Neo Arcadia…

_Would telling the Guardians I am not their true Master X be wise?_ he pondered. For all their worship and praise, even in the wake of current events and the disbelief that had been spiraling behind Harpuia's eyes, they still viewed him with eyes that saw their previous ruler; their eyes saw the great Lieutenant Commander of the Maverick Hunters, one of the legendary warriors of the Elf Wars, the founder of Neo Arcadia. Yet, Copy X had none of those memories, none of what made X who he had been. As the city fell to ruin around him, four short years of senseless destruction of his own kind, all Copy X could do was hate the one who had placed him in command, left him to shoulder the burden he did not understand how to carry.

Copy X had to struggle to keep himself from storming off the lift as it came to rest at the bottom floor of the tower. While he did not risk running into the remaining Guardians or the Judges at this hour, he could not afford to show his agitation to the people, to those who worked in the tower. Gossip was a strong weapon in the wrong hands, and enough had been started with the loss of the excavated robots.

Moving for a hidden access panel, Copy X ensured that no one was able to see him before pushing the panel aside, slipping into the secret corridor, and covering his route just as quickly. Darkness enveloped him as the wall panel slid back into place, but Copy X needed no light.

This place he knew.

This path was one he had secretly ordered the construction of before retiring the mechaniloid team responsible when the sordid truth had been revealed by the one who had built him that he was nothing more than a replica made to stand in after the loss of the true architect of Neo Arcadia.

If it was so important to lock away the infernal elf that fueled the Wars, why not use the body of the one who had birthed that demon fey in the first place?

Copy X's face was set in a vengeful glare by the time he reached the lift in this facility. Impatient and his anger only mounting the closer he came to the target of his ire, he punched the door panels as he waited for the ancient lift car to settle into place, cursing it for being so slow.

He all but stormed in once the doors had slid open.

"_This is your fault!_" he screeched as the lift brought him to the top level of Sanctum Yggdrasil, charging out of the confining car and out into the sanctuary where X's body remained, soulless, lifeless, looking so at peace, so contrasting to the inner turmoil raging within Copy X. "You left this world in the hands of a newbuilt!" he raged. "You gave my maker nothing with which to build me and assumed I could just take the reins? I knew _nothing_ of this world!

Eyes drew away from the lifeless face behind the pod's glass cover, moved upward to the great golden sphere that caged the Dark Elf, then higher still to the nine flourishing boughs of leaves. The entire tree was mechanical, built and designed around the idea of some ancient fable that Copy X did not know, each of the nine holographic bunches of leaves representing the health of the seals upon the elf caged within. Green as the 'leaves' were now, the seals remained intact, untouched, unwavering. If the holograms ever began to turn to yellow, wither to brown? The death of the tree would be the only signal given before the beginning of the end for the city, for the world."

Copy X paced, hesitant to draw close to the body, but angered all the more by the silence that reverberated around him. "You are not the patriarch of the elf you contain, so who made you responsible for _her_? Why not lay the burden on her _father_, make _him_ pay for her crimes? No, he remains lost to us! The one who fought at your side, ended the war with you, and you simply let him walk away as if her contribution to our races' _genocide_had nothing to do with him!

"Do you understand that you shed the blood of _countless numbers _of our own people onto _my hands_?"

The body remained still, quiet, resting in the oblivion of a sleep so deep that none could wake him from.

Copy X really wanted to hit X.

Were it not for the abomination that he'd unleash, he probably would have shoved his fist clean through X's face. Not that it would have made him feel any better, but it would have been something. Anything more than the silence that met his ears when the echoes of his screams faded into silence.

The anger that had been raging within him began to seep away, replaced by a fearful melancholy, and Copy X dropped to his knees. "What am I supposed to do?" he said, his voice breaking. "What can I do for this city, for our people, for our human charges? I'm but a child," he whimpered. "I am not a legend. I am not a hero. I'm not this person the entire city sees fit to put on a pedestal so that they can worship every word that I say, honor me when I don't deserve it. I'm not _you_!"

So many lives had already been lost, innocent lives tarnished with the label of Maverick simply to cover up the fact that those in charge couldn't figure out how to fix the problems that were slowly choking the city. The geothermal power plant that had been operational for decades suddenly couldn't handle the need for power output. Orbital farming colonies started experiencing problems with their environmental controls, losing partial or entire crops. Production plants around the city that provided the necessities for both halves of their population started dealing with odd accidents, programming glitches in the mechaniloid workforce that the Reploid overseers couldn't correct. And that didn't even cover half of what had happened in just the last year.

From what he'd been told, some of the problems he was dealing with had been problems X had been dealing with when a scouting crew had finally managed to find and detain the Dark Elf. When the robot he had been made to replace had sacrificed his body to contain the most dangerous being the world knew at that point.

His thoughts began to turn to the robot units that had been recovered, the units lost during the power outage. He'd sentenced one to death for the sake of the other, and simply because he looked like Copy X? _No_, Copy X reminded himself, _he didn't look like me. I'm a copy, nothing but a replica_. "He looked like you, did you know that? Looked so much like you, so much like me, so much like everything I've come to resent and hate, and I simply ordered him dismantled. Taken apart like he was useless scrap metal simply because I can't deal with the responsibilities you left me to handle. I don't know how to fix this, X. I can talk to the Judges, but they provide me ways to reduce energy expenditure without consideration for a solution. I turn to the Guardians, and they simply treat me as if I am the one meant to provide them with wisdom. The scientist that built me sees me has not bothered to speak to me since my activation. The Resistance fights against me because of what I have done to this city in an effort to keep it all from collapsing around me. This city sees me as its messiah when I am nothing but a failure."

Looking up, he locked his sight on the serene figure before him. "I was built to be your voice until we could heal the Dark Elf. I was built to be the voice of reason and guidance for this city until you could return. I was built to be you, to be this…paragon that your history made you, but I don't have your memories. I don't know all that you did. I was meant for so much, meant to be so great, but I was not built for such a height as they have elevated me to." Copy X felt the building pressure behind his eyes but bit back the tears. "Why is it I came here, came to Sanctum Yggdrasil, to yell at you until something started making sense? Why is it that my anger gave way to fear and despair?" A sob cut him off. "You are as dead to this world as the friend whose child you protect the world from."

A final thought cut through Copy X's mind, and he screamed aloud to the heavens, tears coursing down his face. _All I have done has brought ruin and destruction in your name. I have defamed the name of a hero and a legend._


	13. Lies Undone

_Yeah, so that was a quick break to the crumbling city. Don't worry, we'll be visiting again. Back at Resistance base, we are finding out a few things. One - Blues is a thief, though you can't really blame him. Two - the Resistance members need optical upgrades. Three - Phantom is a real good shot with thrown weapons. Four - …_

_Well, how's about we let you find out for yourself?_

_Also, for those of you who have fallen in love with Fefnir (as portrayed through the writings of The Phantom Gamer), you'll be happy to know that he's going over the later chapters and editing in his own unique brand of humor and charm._

_**Disclaimer: **Mega Man and all related characters and information are the property of Capcom Co., Ltd., Akira Kitamura and Keiji Inafune._

* * *

><p>Reskinning any robot was an involved process and Blues highly doubted it'd changed much over time for the Reploids, although he did note with some approval that the quality of the synthetic skin was higher. They really had done a nice job on him in Neo Arcadia, but it was hard to be impressed or grateful when faced with the <em>cost.<em>

But it was less costly to make than metal parts and Blues really couldn't afford another impromptu charity drive in Neo Arcadia right now, so the Resistance's supplies would have to contribute to his cause now.

He doubted X would be mad after he found out why Blues was doing this. And if he still was angry, well, then Blues would have to reevaluate his perception of X's character.

Most of the base was sleeping in their charger pods now and Blues managed to verify that yes, X had gone back to Cyberspace to recharge. He'd managed to evade detection by the security team fairly easily even when he moved around at night, but X was another matter entirely. He wanted to minimize any outright lying he'd be doing, but he knew that if X knew why Blues needed the synthetic skin, that X would want to involve the lab and the Reploids here and _absolutely not._

There was a Securipider waiting for him when he stepped out of his room, flanked by two Hoppiders. He didn't think the Reploids here noticed that even when he was working in Rocinolle's lab, Blues himself never had to fetch or carry anything around.

When there were willing robots around, a Robot Master did _not_ carry his own luggage. It would be a massive offense to the robots and it'd make them sad.

Ideally, he'd be reskinning Rock in a lab setting; there was a stationary device that really cut down on how long it took, but Blues knew how to do it by hand. Knew how from experience, from times where he'd needed to fix himself.

Kalinka never really was able to stomach the procedure, now that he thought about it. He understood that humans sometimes found it grotesque and morbid and Blues suspected there may be something instinctive going on there. It wasn't like robots used real, organic skin.

Now that? That would be _disgusting._

Cerveau's lab was never locked, Blues noticed, and the Hoppiders skittered in happily, the Securipider following a few paces behind, clinging to the ceiling. They located what Blues needed immediately, and they'd have trilled with delight had they not had orders to remain silent, so instead they sort of cuddled up to him on the network.

He couldn't help smirking slightly at that.

He'd measured exactly how much he'd need and gave himself a five percent margin for error to minimize any waste. Once he completed this, Rock would be ready to boot up again. He'd worry about getting Rock something to wear aside from his blue bodysuit after that, perhaps after he led X back to the room to meet the child.

The android would probably yell (again), but Blues accomplishing his objective with Rock was far more important than hurt feelings.

The Hoppiders were all too happy to carry the synthetic skin, wrapped neatly in a soft fabric, and he headed back down to the sixth level. There was no one in the halls; the base was like a ghost town during recharge. It was sad, actually, because had Blues had that kind of mindset, he really could have robbed them blind.

Perhaps X would let him give some advice on how to step up security. Advice like _locking the doors._

Once they were in the room and Blues actually accepted the package from the Hoppider units, they did trill, though very softly, before slipping from the room to return to their charger pods. Blues remained looking at the locked door for a few moments before turning toward the bed once again.

He was glad for the blanket he'd bundled Rock into; this part could get messy, he thought as he activated his variable system and chose a wire-thin cutter. He needed precision for this; it was important not to scratch the frame underneath if it could be helped, important to get a clean cut, important to be precise so the seams matched up and could meld flawlessly.

Humans need machines to do this. He was a machine, so he relied on his programming and set to his task.

It wouldn't be long now.

* * *

><p>Phantom grunted, dropping to one knee as he carefully placed the limp form of one of the programmers down on the sand, the Reploid having been ordered nearly a day ago to drop into hibernation to retain what little of his charge was left. Phantom had, by then, already transferred the last bit of extra energy from his own tanks into one of the other Reploids and had been carrying the programmer since. Heaving out a tired breath, Phantom turned to the others. "I need you to stay here, out of sight. I don't think the Resistance is going to take kindly to my presence and I'd rather you all not get caught in the crossfire."<p>

Eight heads nodded in silent understanding, hunkering down near the sand dune, huddling close together as Phantom moved over the dune and towards the Resistance base.

Eyes scanned the facility, looked for any way to alert the base of his presence without appearing as a hostile unit. It didn't really help him when he realized half of the security system on the surface of the base were auto-targeting buster turrets. Huffing in agitation, Phantom drew a single kunai, systems quickly locking on the tracking mechanism for the nearest turret. It at least would be one less gun to dodge when the ball dropped.

* * *

><p>Vigile caught the alert the minute it flashed on her screen, and she sat up, double-checking the information. Leaning over, she tapped one of the holo-controls, linking her to the maintenance lab on the fifth level. "Rocinolle, when was the last time you performed maintenance on the targeting controls for Turret Nine?"<p>

'_About a month ago, why? The system report an error?_'

"Yeah. It just shut down."

'_May be sand in the casing again. I honestly thought I fixed that, though. I'll head up in a few minutes after I finish up with this Garm unit._' She swore a moment, hissing. '_Sorry about that. Singed my hand on a loose bit of wiring. Should be done in seven or so._'

"Affirmative, Rocinolle," Vigile responded, closing the comm link only seconds before Turret Fourteen showed a similar report. Turning, she looked over at Dande. "Dande, can you do me a favor and turn the cameras near Turrets Nine and Fourteen? Both of them are coming up with targeting system errors."

"Will do," Dande replied, eyes going wide as one of the cameras caught a bit of movement some distance from the base. The small blackish blur darting across the dunes was followed very quickly by a third turret going offline, and Dande zoomed in.

It wasn't sand in the targeting computer's casing, that was for sure.

"Base alert, we have Neo Arcadian target on surface!" he cried out, all of the security team sitting up as the comm system flared to life. Seconds after the alarm had activated, the remaining twelve turrets opened fire. "Faucon-sama, we need your team on surface. What is your estimated mobilization time?"

'_Forty seconds, Dande,_' Faucon answered. '_How many are we looking at?_'

"One, as far as I can see, but it's moving too fast for me to get a good visual. Probably not Pantheon."

_That means a scout belonging to one of the Generals,_ Faucon figured.

A new signal popped onto the communication network a moment later, and Zero's voice flitted across the net. '_Need backup?_'

Faucon was quick to send a private comm request to Zero, thankful that the android answered immediately. '_We can use all the hands we can get up here, Master Zero. If the troop out there is a high-speed unit, it's likely he's an advance scout for one of the Generals._'

Zero nodded as he broke the connection, grabbing his saber as he bolted for the door. Having spent the last few days hanging out in Cerveau's lab and tinkering with whatever happened to be on the medic's table at the time, Zero had gotten a pretty extensive history of the issue with Neo Arcadia, starting with the advent of Copy X's reign over the city all the way through to current events. What time X could afford to spend with him was spent going over the fragmented memories that were restoring and discussing the city as it had been, as X intended to remake it once he reclaimed control. All the while, Zero had come to the realization that his place, whether he could remember it or not, was on the battlefield as warrior and defender. If that included helping the Resistance defend their home, so be it.

Jumping, Zero curled into himself, hitting the rising lift platform just before it moved to the next floor, and sent the command to take him all the way up as he uncurled and got to his feet. Leaping for the ledge as the lift neared the top level, Zero heaved himself up and toward the ladder that led to the surface, saber drawn and thumb hovering over the activation control. He came up just behind a group of Faucon's troops, moving towards the head of security. "Alright," he said, crouching behind Faucon, "what now?"

Faucon handed Zero a small metal disk. "Put that transponder somewhere on your person. It'll keep the turrets from targeting you."

Above them, ten guns continued their barrage, two more having lost their targeting abilities courtesy of whatever unit was attacking the base.

"Any identification?"

Faucon shook his head, turning to Colbor. "Not yet. I'm having as much luck getting a fix on this unit as Dande and the rest of the security crew."

Zero reached over, grabbing the electrobinoculars from Faucon, watching for a moment before raising the gear to his eyes, monitoring the movement of the unit and watching as another small projectile was fired from his hand towards the base. "Well, whoever that is, I think they're trying to take the guns out first." His comment was punctuated by the sound of something metal impacting with another gun, one more turret falling silent. "Guy's got great aim," he said. "Anyone recognize a unit, mostly black and white armor, V-shaped crest to his helmet…and is that a red _scarf_?" Who ever heard about a soldier wearing a scarf, let alone doing so in the desert?

The entire security team froze at the description.

"What is Guardian Phantom doing here?" someone whispered.

Zero's eyes went wide as the name registered. This was one of X's Guardians, one of the four soldiers meant to stand as his protectors and the head of the four armies that countered what was left of the Maverick scourge still infesting the planet. "All of you, stay here. Provide cover fire if I look like I need it, but keep back." The green blade formed from his saber hilt with a comforting hiss, and Zero bolted from the base, saber at his side as he charged for the Guardian.

Phantom froze in his tracks, old stories told by his father echoing in his ears at the sight before him, of an emerald-hued beam saber held in the hands of a red-armored warrior, long tail of sun-blonde hair flowing behind him as he moved.

This was the legendary warrior, Zero, that X had spoken so highly of throughout Phantom's life.

As the turrets locked on his position and opened fire, Phantom moved to the side once more, boosters firing as he tried to get clear of the trackers. Another pair of kunai flew through the air, disabling two more of the guns. Boosting backwards, he watched Zero draw closer, the tip of his saber almost dragging the ground as he ran.

Zero's wrist pivoted as he neared his target, blade swinging up over his head before coming down, aiming to sever Phantom's throwing arm off at the shoulder.

Phantom yelped slightly, dodging backwards to avoid the overhead strike of the blade, his own beam katana drawn from its sheath as he regained his footing. Bringing the blade up, he drifted back into the sand a little as Zero's saber slammed against his own. Ducking to the side, he forced his blade forward, the reverse grip drawing the weapon dangerously close to his own arm, and Zero was forced a step back, the Shadow Guardian catching his balance as the sand continued to shift beneath his feet. "I'm not here to fight you," Phantom said, saber spinning in his hand so the blade faced forward.

"A Neo Arcadian Guardian, tasked with fighting all those that your city deem Maverick, and you think I'll believe you're not here to fight?" Zero moved aside, getting out of the tracking sights of the remaining turrets, all of which opened fire on Phantom. "You attack our base, disable our defenses, and then expect me to believe that you're here for another reason?"

Phantom pivoted, dropping into a defensive stance as he backed away from the turret fire, struggling to keep Zero between him and the guns. "I mean this base and its people no harm," he countered.

"Likely story." Zero's blade spun above his head, coming down in a diagonal strike, blade deflected as Phantom moved to the side, trying to put as much distance between them as he could. Zero's saber spun through the air, humming, as Zero pulled his arm back, aiming to strike out at the Guardian's hip plate to disable his leg. The strike was parried, though Zero was by no means surprised, and his blade spun once more through the air, coming down on the opposite diagonal.

Springing into a backwards flip, Phantom landed in a crouch, katana once more in a reverse grip. "I speak the truth!" he cried. "I mean no harm!" Rising from the ground, his katana caught Zero's blade once more, the blades hissing against one another. "I am not here on orders from the city."

Zero frowned, ducking as he pulled his saber up and away from the katana, and kicked out, knocking Phantom to the ground. "If you come without orders, why are you here?" Swinging down with the saber as he dropped lower to the ground, Zero reversed the motion of his blade, missing Phantom's left knee by mere inches. "You are not welcome here, and I will not hesitate to make an example of you."

* * *

><p>Two levels beneath the dueling warriors, X rushed into the security room, flitting past two security members heading for their chairs. "What happened?"<p>

Sentinella and Vigile both looked up, though it was Fidare who answered. "Master X, several of our turrets were taken out by an unknown agent moments ago. Faucon only recently confirmed, though Master Zero, that the attacker is Hidden Phantom."

A bolt of cold shot up X's spine at the name. If Phantom was here…

X shot back out of the room, flying more than running, as he headed for the surface.

* * *

><p>Phantom continued to fall back, his katana dancing through the air, continuously parrying and deflecting Zero's attacks. If this was the warrior that had helped his father end the Elf Wars, to have held his own for so long was only a sign to Phantom that the blonde was taking it easy, barely perceived him as a true threat. "Please, you must listen!"<p>

The hum of their blades, paired with the electric crackle that resulted each time their blades met, sang louder to Zero's ears than his target's pleas, saber spinning around him deftly as he continued his assault. The Guardian was lucky that Zero had been made aware of his connection to X—had this been a simple scout, the fight would have been over long before now. "I have little reason to believe you, Phantom," Zero chided, dropping low as he tried to sweep Phantom's legs out from under him, saber swinging just a moment behind the leg.

Phantom leapt over Zero's leg, moving back to avoid the saber, but fell short of his intended landing point, the tip of the saber slicing through the front of one leg. With a cry, Phantom dropped onto the knee of the injured leg, dropping his katana as his hand snapped over the wound, feeling the coolant running over his fingers. Panting and gritting his teeth against the pain, Phantom dialed down the sensory receptors in his leg, free hand grabbing for the hilt of his katana and raising it, making no move but to shield his body. "I am not here to fight you!" he cried out.

X made it to the surface, catching sight of the security team. "Tell them to disengage the turrets!" he shouted as he ran past the assembled troops and towards the red and black forms in the distance.

Colbor linked into the relay and opened a direct comm with the security room. '_Security team, this is Colbor. Master X just gave a direct order to shut down the turrets._'

"Colbor, confirm," Vigile asked, hand hovering over one of the kill switches for the turrets. "Master X did what?"

'_Shut the turrets off! Master X is out there without a transponder!_'

Vigile smacked the button, the remaining seven turret feeds going black as they powered down. "Security team, turrets are offline. Provide cover for Masters X and Zero."

A chorus of '_Affirmative_' rang out from the team.

Zero kept the saber steady, the blade hovering just below Phantom's neck. "I have no intentions of killing you, Guardian, but you are not supposed to be here."

"I'm not here to fight," Phantom repeated, wincing as he shut down the receptors in his leg. "I'm not here on the city's orders, Master Zero. I'm here because I'm looking for asylum." He took a deep breath, calming himself as he deactivated his katana and set it in its sheath. "I'm also looking for my father. My _real_ father, not that thing wearing his face."

X had been close enough that he heard the Guardian's last sentence, slowing to a stop a few feet behind Zero. "Zero, it's okay. Stand down."

Zero looked over his shoulder, saw X nod, and sighed, relaxing. The blade dropped, his thumb dancing over the activation controls, and his saber deactivated.

X moved closer to Phantom, wincing at the pool of red fluid staining the sand beneath the Reploid's leg. "You're not badly injured, are you?"

"Not too severely, Father," Phantom answered, feeling the auto-repair system finally kick online, "though Master Zero's blade did sink deep enough that I'm going to have a bit of an issue walking."

"My apologies, X."

"The fault is my own, Master Zero," Phantom said, bowing his head. "I should have opted for something less…indicative of an attack to get your attention."

X's halo shimmered red, the Cyber Elf reaching out for Phantom's leg, energy seeping into the wound and reconnecting the batch of motor control wires that Zero's attack had severed. "That any better?"

The eyes that turned up to X were full of pain. "Father…" It didn't take much to realize what X had done, what it meant for the former ruler of Neo Arcadia. "What happened to you?"

X smiled, though the motion was strained. "I think that's something we should discuss downstairs." He stood, signaling to the security team, and one of them trotted over. "Phantom, I'm going to need you to hand off your weapons for now. It's just a precaution, considering."

"That's alright, Father," he said as he stood. Reaching behind him, he grabbed his katana and his deactivated Cross Star, handing the items to Zero. As the Reploid from the base neared him, Phantom turned around, holding his hands behind his back. "If this is what is necessary for the Resistance to hear me out, I have no complaints."

Wordlessly, Moineau grabbed the restraints from his belt, handcuffing the Guardian.

"Let's get you down to our medical officer," X said.

Zero reached out, wrapped a hand tightly around one of Phantom's arms, and started walking. "I'm honestly sorry for the misunderstanding. I've just…not gotten a good impression of your city in the short while I've been active," he admitted. "Though I am impressed at your abilities in combat. I hadn't thought that one of X's children would have been so skilled."

X smiled, looking over his shoulder at the two. "Did you honestly think that I'd have all my children specialize in ranged combat?"

Zero shrugged. "From what little I can recall, you didn't use melee weaponry all that much. That was my specialty."

Phantom smiled faintly. "Father told me that there was a time when he did learn to use the saber. It's part of why I trained in its use, even though my skillset is geared more towards stealth and information gathering."

"Oh?" Zero cocked an eyebrow. "What was the rest?"

Phantom fell silent, bowing his head. "I…do not wish to say at present, Master Zero." He hadn't failed to catch the blonde's admission to his father about his memory, though he wondered just how much it had been affected. If enough had been damaged, it was likely unwise to bring up certain topics. "Father, if you can send a few of your troops behind the sand dune where Zero and I were fighting, there are nine programmers from Neo Arcadia waiting there. I would have retrieved them myself, but it's probably better that they be brought in by your team than by me."

X nodded. "Zero, relay the order," he said before turning his attention back to Phantom. "I take it they're on the run as well?"

Phantom nodded, watching as the security team moved for the Reploids waiting behind the crested rise in the sand. "They were marked as Maverick because of the emergency response issues during the power outage in the city. The…Reploid currently pretending to be you ordered them all retired, despite the fact that they were supposed to be safe from that kind of order until after the investigation had been completed as to _why_ Pantheon and Golem units started gunning down humans."

X froze at the comment. "The patrols did _what_?"

Phantom shook his head. "It would be better for me to discuss this in the presence of your senior members. I do not want to have to repeat the story unnecessarily, and I'd rather appreciate not having to keep my sensory array offline. It's as if my right leg doesn't exist beneath my knee right now."

Zero grabbed Phantom as they reached the ladder access to the first level, waiting for X to descend before jumping down the shaft with the Guardian in tow. "Stay close and stay quiet," Zero ordered. "We've already had enough excitement in the base to last a couple of months now."

Phantom nodded mutely in understanding.

* * *

><p>Cerveau was amazed that they'd traveled all the way out here with no Energen Crystals, with no method to recharge. As he understood, the coders hadn't even been able to fully charge before fleeing. It'd be like humans traversing the desert with no food and far too little water. One of them was even in hibernation, his charge barely a flicker. He'd been posted on the basic situation by security and had ten chargers ready; even if Phantom were to become their prisoner, even if he wasn't a refugee from Neo Arcadia, he'd need the rest.<p>

"Chargers, all eight of you," he immediately ordered them. He didn't need to scan them to tell that they were about to drop, especially now that the concept that they were actually safe would lower their alarm level. The ninth coder, the one in hibernation, had been placed into a charger by one of the security officers and Cerveau was busy hooking him up and making certain he was settled.

"Guardian Phantom, I need you on an examination table," Cerveau continued as he checked the hibernating coder's connection one last time, made sure that he was getting a charge. The security team was acting as stand-in aides to Cerveau while the med lab was so crowded and, honestly, if their injuries had been more severe, he may have needed Rocinolle up here to help with repairs.

Phantom walked over to the examination table, Zero helping the Guardian up as Phantom took a seat on the table. "Should I lay down?" he asked Cerveau.

"Yes, although I'm afraid we'll have to restrain you," Cerveau said, turning and staring pointedly at Moineau, clearly hoping the idea to take the handcuffs off Phantom so he could lie down and be properly restrained would reach the security officer through osmosis.

Moineau raised an eyebrow at Cerveau for a moment before realizing what the medic was trying to convey. Walking over to the table, he swiped a small fob across the data register, the cuffs popping open.

Zero had had an arm over Phantom's shoulders before Moineau had reached the table, pushing Phantom down into a prone position as soon as the Guardian's arms were free. "Precautions," he said somewhat apologetically.

Cerveau grabbed his medical cart and pulled it along with him as he rounded to Phantom's side. "Ah, disengage the armor. It cut clean through," though it didn't surprise Cerveau, "so I'll need to look beneath."

Phantom nodded softly, body held down by a trio of thick metal bands secured to the sides of the table. "Master Zero, if you don't mind. The release trigger is under a panel on the inside edge of the cuff." He twitched his leg to the side, unable to raise the limb because of the restraint over his thighs. "I'd ask my father, but…" eyes fell on the ethereal figure, "but I'm not sure he can affect things on the physical realm anymore."

X could hear the tremor in his youngest son's voice. "We'll discuss that later, Phantom."

Pressing down against Phantom's knee, Zero undid the restraint over his leg, finding the nearly seamless split in the gold band that wrapped around Phantom's upper leg, and he depressed the small trigger within. With a mechanical whir, the miniature gears in the leg armor began to turn, the individual plates disengaging from one another as the armor loosened its hold on the Guardian's leg.

A red window popped up in Phantom's peripheral, and the Guardian dropped his head onto the table. "The lower gears are registering a release issue." Zero's strike had cut through a pair of armor plates. "I'm sorry…" he looked at Cerveau, "but do you know how to force a manual disengage?"

"Your pain registers are offline, right?" Cerveau ran his hand along the armor plates, deftly finding the seams, but looking up to see Phantom's slight nod of assent before giving a good tug, pulling the plate off forcefully. He frowned at the injury: Zero really did have excellent aim. He'd severely incapacitated the Guardian with a single blow. "It's not as bad as it looks," Cerveau acknowledged, reaching for his tools and choosing a cutter. Clean as the injury was, he needed it a bit cleaner before he could repair anything.

"Cerveau, what is this I heard about…" Ciel stopped in the doorway, flushed and slightly out of breath, as her eyes locked on the armored form currently held against the table Cerveau was standing by. "So I guess what I heard was true." Ciel looked to X and Zero for a moment, looking for any sign that she should keep out of the room, and then stepped in. "Guardian Phantom," she said, "it's certainly a surprise to see you here."

X nodded at Ciel. "Phantom, this is my co-commander, Ciel. I'm not sure if you met while she was still in Neo Arcadia."

"We did not, Father," he said, turning to face the young woman. "You must be of great importance to my father for him to value you so highly, Lady Ciel. It is an honor to finally make your acquaintance."

Ciel's eyes had grown to the size of tea saucers when she heard the Guardian refer to X as 'Father', even though the Cyber Elf's presence in the room should have tempered her shock. If he was aware that the Reploid in Neo Arcadia wasn't who he was meant to replace... She collected her manners, smiling a bit. "An honor, indeed, for both of us," she responded. "Although it does interest me that you refer to X as your father. Something must have happened in the city."

Cerveau rapped the cutters on the table twice, frowning at Ciel. "We'll have time for that shortly, though for the time being…" For the time being, wasn't it more important that his patients were looked after, even if they were enemies? While it was true, yes, Phantom could still be interrogated, wasn't it bad form to do so when working on repairs?

Ciel nodded. "My apologies. I'll get back to work for now. X, if you could let me know when I can come by?"

"Will do, Ciel." For a moment, X wondered where Milan had gone off to, then figured he was still in her lab, waiting for Ciel to return. "I'll make sure someone messages Milan or Alouette to let you know."

"Thank you." Turning, she headed back the way she'd come.

"Cerveau, is silence required when you work? Lady Ciel's questioning did not bother me."

"Humans have etiquette for these kinds of things. I worry sometimes that spending so much time here with us has left a bad influence on her." And Cerveau was stubbornly believing that yes, they would seize Neo Arcadia back in her lifetime, before she was killed, and that she'd be able to socialize with other humans again. That she'd be able to normalize her lifestyle again.

Phantom nodded. "I'm aware of that. I just wanted to ensure that it was alright for me to speak now, even if I am currently being treated as a prisoner rather than a political refugee."

Zero looked to the Reploid. "You did say you were seeking asylum," he recalled.

"Do I _want_ to know?" X's voice was seething with a venomous rage few ever heard in the normally reticent elf.

Phantom sighed. "Would anyone have a means of providing Lady Ciel with a recording of this conversation? Or would she be able to come back? If she serves as your co-commander, Father, she needs to hear what I have to say."

Cerveau didn't respond. Instead, he paused in his work and looked to X: it was his decision.

X considered the situation for a minute, figuring that it would be better for Ciel if she weren't involved in this discussion. Enough had happened in the past few days, and letting her hear from his own son how far the copy had fallen would only weigh that much more on her. "Cerveau, can you send a message to Rocinolle, have her send up…" X searched for the name for the unit she'd been working on with Blues the day before. "It's a Garm she was working on, Raul I think. We can have him record the meeting and report to Ciel later." One thing that X had liked about the Garm before their conversion to war drones was that they excelled as observation units.

Of course, it helped that they didn't _look_ like reconnaissance mechaniloids.

"Of course, Master X," Cerveau replied. He sent the message even as he bent over Phantom's injury, cutting out some ruined wire. He just needed to repair the severed connections and security the new wires in, then make sure the area was back to operational condition before patching in a new swatch of synthetic skin. Phantom's armor would take a separate look, but the Guardian would be able to move without any inhibitions from where the injury had been.

Phantom couldn't help the laugh. "Well, at least that explains why our recovery counts didn't always match up with the mechaniloid assignment tallies. You've been swiping a good number of the city's drone units, huh?"

"You know me," X replied, though there was still an undertone of anger in his voice. "I have to get as many of my citizens out of there when retirement orders go through. The mechaniloids and supposed Mavericks just prove easier to extract than the Pantheons. It bugs me every time we end up having to retire units during extractions and raids."

Zero suddenly leaned over the table, eyes searching along the side of Phantom's helmet.

"What are you doing, Master Zero?"

"Looking for a release trigger. Your helmet design is…" Zero wasn't sure how to describe it. It wasn't scary, but something about it just unnerved the android. "It's unsettling," he finally muttered.

Phantom turned his head away from Zero. "Base of the neck," he instructed. "And it's supposed to be a little unnerving. All the better for what my original assignment was."

"Which was?" Zero asked.

"Interrogation. Phantom was head of the investigations division of city security before he got reassigned as the general of the Zan'ei strike force," X answered. "We had a Maverick resurgence suddenly crop up a little over two decades ago, so all four of my kids got switched out of public service for military purposes."

Pressing on the release mechanism, Zero was quick to remove the helmet, exposing a face quite similar to X's, though the hair was blue-black rather than… "Brunet," Zero said, looking to X.

"What of it?"

"I haven't seen you without a helmet since you woke me," Zero explained. "You're a brunet."

Cerveau's head snapped up to look back at Zero curiously. "What triggered that memory?"

Zero tilted his head to the side, considering Phantom's face for a moment before he averted his eyes. "Sorry for staring," he said. "I guess it's just how much he looks like his father."

"Wait, what?" Phantom looked at Zero.

"Aside from the black eyes and hair, you look like your father when he's not wearing his helmet. Same short hair, too."

"Not what I meant," Phantom corrected. "I heard you make mention of your memory files earlier. What happened?"

"Eh," Zero said with a shrug. "I'm old. Apparently, anyway. Stuff happened. They're restoring, but it's taking time."

"They're restoring at a good rate," Cerveau added, "much more quickly than I'd hoped." Although, speaking of repairs, "Guardian Phantom, your own auto-repair function isn't…really functioning." More like not at all. Cerveau tilted his head and initiated a thorough scan of the Guardian's system, looking for what, exactly, was causing the auto-repair to perform so poorly. The results of the scan made him frown. To say that Phantom's systems were taxed would be a severe understatement. "Your systems are…your charge is low and your auto-repair is starved for nanites, so I'm going to get some new ones into circulation to boost your maintenance arrays until you can start manufacturing more of your own again." After that, a charger pod would be best, Cerveau thought. Just how many days did they spend trekking through the desert?

A soft growl came from the doorway as a bluish-white lupine mechaniloid walked into the room. The singular optic turned to X, the unit emitting a soft bark at the Cyber Elf.

"It's good to see you too, Raul," X said, petting the dog's head and watching as his tail wagged, ears dropping a bit as X's energy skirted across the sensor array. "Cerveau, it alright if he sits on the exam table next to Phantom?" he asked as the medic returned with a syringe.

Phantom took one look at the medic and what he held, and his eyes closed. "Crap," he murmured.

"That's fine," Cerveau said with a nod as he readied the syringe of nanites.

"Raul, up," X directed, pointing to the nearby exam table.

The mechaniloid yipped, moving to the table, his hind legs tensing for a split second before the unit pounced onto the table. Walking in a careful circle a few times, Raul finally sat down, looking at X and tilting his head to the side, as if waiting for a signal.

Phantom couldn't tear his eyes from the Garm. He had been amazed enough earlier in the week when he'd seen the Hoppiders trailing along behind the progenitor, moving more like the arachnids they were based on. To see this unit not only walking with the same grace as the organic canines he'd seen in Neo Arcadia—jumping even!-but exhibiting all the characteristic behaviors as well? He honestly wondered if there were any Securipiders on the base and if they'd started making webs in the high corners of rooms yet.

While Phantom was distracted by the changes to the Garm—which _were_ impressive; Cerveau had no idea how Blues even began to program them to move and behave so convincingly—Cerveau stuck the needle into the Guardian, near the injury but into one of the main nanite relays that was located in the Reploid's leg in the hopes that the close proximity would speed the auto-repair process.

Phantom wasn't even aware that he'd been given the nanite infusion until his systems registered the increased numbers, his auto-repair systems immediately redirecting the new nanites to the deep gash in his leg.

Cerveau scanned Phantom once again as he removed the needle and nodded with satisfaction at what the Guardian's systems were doing with the new flood of nanites. At least it really was just a deficiency and not something more worrisome. "That should close the injury the rest of the way and I imagine you'll be feeling more alert after another minute or so."

"Thank you, Cerveau," Phantom said. "I'm guessing now is as good a time as any to start asking questions."

"Why don't we start with why you're really here," Canard said, turning away from the bank of pods the programmers were in. "Unlike Master X, we're not as trusting. Family or not, you're still one of the four Generals of that deranged copy that tried to have us killed."

"Canard, that is completely uncalled for," X chided the security officer. "I can understand suspicion, but if you haven't noticed, Phantom has been referring to me as 'Father' since he _got_ here, which tells me a lot more than you might think it does. Instead of immediately jumping to conclusions, how's about you let my son talk without treating him like he doesn't deserve the same consideration everyone else got when they came here?"

"It's alright, Father," Phantom said, waving one hand as best he could. "And as for why I'm really here," he said, addressing Canard, "I am seeking political asylum. The city believes me to be serving as a double agent, but I fully intend to justify the retirement order placed against me."

"How in the world did _you_ earn a retirement order?" Moineau asked.

"After the attack on the city a week ago, and the realization that the one ruling the city was no longer my father, I examined the lab that was raided and discovered that whoever attacked the city that day revived one of the great myths of our people, one of the legends of old. The only way I could justify my leaving the city would be under a false retirement order, filed on a claim of insubordination and the unwarranted retirement of multiple Reploids. The copy parading as my father believes that I assassinated the programmers I brought here. As he was the one who gave me the order, he had no reason to doubt my claim when I brought it to the attention of the Judges, and they unanimously supported the retirement order."

"The others are not going to respond well to that order," X said. "Or were they made aware of this ruse?"

"Unfortunately, Father, I was the only one on the network that day, the only one that heard you. To tell them risked a great deal, especially if they believed that something had happened to me." Eyes drifted to the side, looking at the nondescript table he was laying on. "I don't want to know what they think of me right now," he admitted.

"They're your siblings, Phantom, and my children. I doubt that they are just blindly following orders."

"Father, we've been blindly following orders for how long now? I can't even tell when it was that you…whatever happened to you, and when that mockery came into power. I realized a change in behavior after you were assigned to the Dark Elf sealing project, but I thought it was just the fact that the city was progressively getting worse."

"Dark Elf?" Zero asked. "Why does that name sound familiar?"

"If Father's stories aren't exaggerated tales of bravery and courage told to newbuilts as they are being tucked in for the night," Phantom said with a smirk, "then Dark Elf was part of the scourge you and Father cleansed from the planet a century ago."

Zero turned to X. "Remember that comment I made about the glory days and the old man war stories? I have _got_ to hear this one."

X smiled, both at Zero and at Phantom. "Phantom was always so enraptured by those stories. Perhaps after this little chat, he can tell you the story. We'll see how well he remembers it."

"Hard to believe it's been almost thirty-seven years," Phantom noted. "Well, thirty-nine if you start counting from Harpy, but you get what I mean."

Cerveau had gone over to the remaining charger pod, the last empty one, and ran a cable from one of its ports over to the table Phantom was lying on. "Alright, your systems are taking care of the auto-repair nicely, but I do want to get some energy into you, so I'm going to plug you into the charger for now." Though Phantom wouldn't need to begin a sleep cycle so he could stay awake for further questioning.

"You mentioned hearing me," X noted as Phantom closed his eyes, inhaling deeply as the charge initiated.

"I did, while on the network after the outage. Two of my troops hotwired a terminal for me to get online. Needless to say, I think you noticed that Master Zero booted me off not long after I'd signed on. Shut down all my access codes to the net for almost the whole day, too."

Zero blinked. "I don't know what gave you the idea that I was doing any hacking, but…that wasn't me."

Phantom was sure that, had it not been for the cord pumping fresh energy into his body—_Where are they getting their energy supply from?_-he would have passed out from the shock. "But…that's not possible! I heard my father mention the claiming of administrative rights on the network, and the only other one granted that access, the only one he ever mentioned, was you if we ever managed to unearth where they scientists had placed you after your second sealing?"

"Second sealing? Administrative what? Unearth?" Zero looked to X. "Are you sure your kid's alright in the head?"

"You can't be telling me that the progenitor was the one behind the attack!"

"Progenitor?" X had used that term only a handful of times, referring to Reploids from older generational lines. "What progenitor unit?" _Does he mean Blues?_

The Shadow Guardian blanched. "I thought he was here with you!"

"Thought who was here with whom?" Moineau asked.

"That's not possible! The progenitor has to be here! He's the only reason that I even managed to get my hands on the base's coordinates." Phantom was starting to panic, and he struggled to get his systems back under control. "Both of the progenitor models have to be here. I _know_ they're here."

"If they are," Canard said, "we certainly haven't noticed."

"Wait, both? Phantom," X moved towards his son, hands settling on the Reploid's shoulders. "Phantom, look at me. Start from the beginning. What progenitor units are you talking about?"

Phantom's entire body was seizing up with panic and fear, and he desperately reached out for his father, hand twisting up at such an obviously wrong angle, visibly shuddering as his fingers began to pass right through the Cyber Elf's body. "_Father?_" There were tears welling in Phantom's eyes. "No, I…I know they're here. I can't…They can't…he…he looked…"

All Zero needed was that one look from X, that desperate begging request for help, and the blonde was climbing onto the table next to Phantom, disengaging the locks holding the Guardian down. No words were exchanged; Zero had been in this situation once before, familiar tawny hair falling over a jagged X-shaped scar, an unexplained mark framing emerald eyes that were starting to bleed to static grey. Zero was careful not to jostle the Reploid, carefully pulling him up into his lap, holding him like a parent trying to console a child who had woken from a terrible nightmare. "Shh, Axl," Zero whispered, lost in his own memories as he held Phantom close, tried to soothe the pain that was almost radiating off the unit.

X and Phantom turned to Zero, shocked to hear the displaced name, and both were surprised to see a glimmer of ultramarine showing beneath the obsidian sheen of his eyes.

"Phantom," X whispered, drawing close. "It's okay. We're here. Settle down."

Phantom took a shaky breath, trying to calm himself even as Zero's hand began rubbing and patting his back. Even with the odd name Zero had used, the motion did help to calm him, and Phantom reached out for X once more, careful to keep from pushing too hard against the immaterial form.

X pulsed a fresh wave of energy through his body, forcing himself to push just that much closer to an actual material form, and he took Phantom's hand.

Zero brushed a stray bit of hair away from Phantom's eyes. "You okay, Phantom?" he asked, as if he hadn't even realized he'd dropped a different name a moment before.

The Guardian nodded, though he remained in Zero's embrace, relaxed in his arms as X's hand grazed along his own with that strange electrical current. "The…the day that Zero's lab was broken into…" He took another breath, forcing himself to center. "The morning before the attack, we received a priority alert from an archaeology team that had been sent out. And before anyone gets to making smart remarks, they weren't sent out for anything close to what their specialization would suggest. The copy in charge wanted them to find new crystal mines. Somewhere along the line, they'd stumbled across what looked like an old lab because they were getting insane energy readings. Turns out that the reading wasn't from crystals." Phantom turned to his father. "They found a progenitor with an active core. There was a second unit there, but that one…wasn't in any sort of condition that indicated that he'd even be running again.

"Both of them were brought back to the city, and when the energy readings from the first unit were given the once-over by the crews in Neo Arcadia, Harpy asked me to go get…" Phantom growled. "What name do you use for that thing anyway?"

"Copy X," X replied. "Wasn't my idea, but since it really was his designated purpose, it kind of stuck."

Phantom nodded. "Harpy told me to get Copy X, to alert him, so that he could see them, see what had been found." Phantom sucked in a breath. "Father, if you could have seen the second unit, you would have sworn that one was your twin brother."

_Twin brother?_ X frowned. _Twin…but that would mean…_

"The copy…he saw the two, saw the energy readings off of the first and realized that it may have served as a solution to the energy crisis. I mean, the readings…our systems were having difficulty keeping up with the sheer output capacity. The second…the second ran on a solar core, which is exceedingly odd, considering that most Reploids built have main and sub-tanks for energy storage, even the ones that were first gens off of your schematics. And," Phantom's breath hitched again. "Copy X had gone to look at the second unit, since they tech crew in the lab had him under a few UV lamps, and when he saw the unit's face…something just changed in the way he was holding himself. He ordered the second unit cannibalized for parts to repair the first and his core extracted for the research teams to go over to see if the technology could be applied."

The more Phantom talked, the more information he provided about the scenario, the more the mismatched puzzle pieces in his head started to click together. That didn't stop the sick lurch that hit him when he heard what the fate of the second 'progenitor' had been. It was one thing to use parts from unrecoverable machines—it'd been done enough during the later years of the Maverick Wars and far too often during the Elf Wars—but to condemn a unit to certain death? What had his city become in four short years?

Even the ill feeling twisting through X's systems wasn't doing much to stem the tide of anger building, targeted at a completely different member of the Light family.

"I…Once Copy X decided to leave the lab, I followed him. Despite everything screaming at me that he'd retire me for speaking my mind about the matter, regardless of the fact that he was my father," Phantom grimaced slightly at the thought, "I tried to plead with him to spare the second unit, to fix him. We had the parts and we had the workforce to ensure that they were both restored, but he simply tossed my concern aside as me being too wrapped up in the idea that we had to preserve Reploid history. I tried to explain, tried to make him see reason, but…he explained to me that the city resources were strained enough, and were I to have my way, if Harpy and I were so dead set on rebuilding both units, we were basically placing the reconstruction of two units that may never even reactivate over the health and well-being of the Reploids already within the city. We'd be taking from our own without a guarantee of a return, without it being known if our work would even allow them to wake again."

"Why didn't you push him harder?"

"I was too afraid. When one of the technicians we had working on the progenitors suggested that it was of historic value to restore both units, Copy X warned him that continuing to put the reconstruction of two pieces of history over the continued security of the human population would have them marked as Maverick. Harpy and I were aware that that threat extended to us as well."

"How did you not realize that Copy X wasn't me? I wouldn't hang retirement over the heads of my people, especially my children, like some kind of threat that can be idly tossed about. To dangle a sword of Damocles over Neo Arcadia? You know I would never…" X sighed. He really needed to not blow up at his son. Thirty-seven years may have passed since his activation, but all of them were still young, knowing more of tactics and warfare, battle and survival, then they did of their own psychology. Physically, they were already decades-old models. In mind? Phantom was probably just hitting his figurative teens.

Phantom snorted. "You would think that him having red eyes would have been a dead giveaway, but Fefnir's recoded his eyes like…six times in the past four years. I think we all thought it was cosmetic."

* * *

><p>Down in Rocinolle's lab, Blues was becoming increasingly agitated, not that he permitted it to show in his body language. He'd resolutely kept those emotional displays offline despite the stress his systems were warning him was impacting his processor, his mind. He didn't sleep, but he did need to defrag and run maintenance regularly. After such a long period offline? He'd ordered Rock's mind to defrag the second he got enough power through him to sustain a charge and, honestly, he should have defragged immediately upon arriving here at this base, but it simply hadn't been an option. Now he'd been running himself ragged for right around a week with no time to defrag and do maintenance on himself, no time to take care of himself.<p>

It was sad how quickly he fell back into old habits.

The Garm unit that X called in to record the audio and video feed for Ciel to watch later was on the network, of course, so Blues had a front row seat to what was going on in the medical lab. Phantom was speaking freely and openly about what went on in Neo Arcadia in the course of the last week and his mention that the only reason he found the base in the first place was because of following the progenitor unit left a cold feeling in Blues' systems.

He'd completely missed the Guardian during his short raid on Neo Arcadia. He could have given the base away to actual hostiles.

That was not a miscalculation anyone could afford. He had no idea where the Reploid had hidden himself; he didn't think he had Shadow's caliber of a skillset, but that he'd missed him? He'd been in far too much of a hurry.

He anticipated that Phantom would say far more than Blues wanted him to, would release information that, in all honesty, he felt was best left undivulged, was best left unsaid. He grit his teeth; Rocinolle didn't seem to be privy to what was going on up there, not yet, but suddenly leaving his work unfinished in the lab would plant red flags.

There was nothing he could do to stem the tide upstairs at any rate. Leaving the base wasn't really an option right now, either, not when X was here. He'd have to wait.

* * *

><p>"You mentioned the progenitor unit was the one that led you here. How does that make any sense if the city still has them?"<p>

"That's the thing," Phantom said, looking at Colbor. "The city _doesn't_ have them. The one that we…that the city techs were rebuilding actually reactivated during the attack on the city. The night you retrieved Master Zero from the pod in the lab beneath Sub Arcadia," and at this, Phantom pulled the blonde strands from his vest pocket, "was the night the progenitor took his partner and disappeared from the city. The following morning, just as we were starting to get the city back online, the progenitor returned. I can only assume from the box of parts his Hoppider scouts were carrying that he raided supplies from the manufacturing district in order to repair the other, but I still have no clue how he managed to avoid the scans. I _know_ the city was keeping an eye out for that energy reading."

"What's to say the progenitor unit you're talking about wasn't the one to take the city down?"

"As far as the techs were aware, neither of them had access, wired or wireless, into the network. The theory was being tossed around that one of the rescues with the Resistance had been very good at hiding the fact they learned how to hack. Like I said before, though, I wasn't on the net long enough to really know what was going on. I got quarantine locked and booted back into my own head so fast I wasn't sure what had hit me. Once the city power grid came back online, I tried getting back onto the net to see what I could do about tracing, and that's when I realized all my access codes had been blocked."

"So it's still plausible that your tech crew missed something," Canard commented, "and that the progenitor…whatever that may be, brought the city down around you."

"They didn't just bring the city down. You mentioned earlier that the patrols in the city started gunning down humans."

More than one pair of eyes turned to Zero when that little tidbit of information was let out.

Phantom nodded. "It wasn't just humans. The Pantheons and Golems that were first-responders to the scene started attacking anyone and anything that got too close to them, despite there being redundant protocols to avoid that kind of event. They all have scanners to identify whether those around them are of biological or mechanical origins, and then orders that were meant to help calm the panicked crowds. The programmers I brought were the ones directly responsible for the faulty units. It's why they were under investigation in the first place."

Moineau snorted. "Leave it to Copy X to retire Reploids for allowing their personalities to show through but give his programmers the benefit of an investigation." The officer shook his head at Phantom. "Nothing against you, of course, seeing as you did refuse the order to assassinate them, but there's a sickening hierarchy of who does and doesn't fall under the legal protections Master X provided for the city's residents."

* * *

><p>Blues actually stopped in his task at Zero's question. The Pantheon and Golem units up top were <em>gunning people down<em>? That was _not_ part of the order he'd given them. That kind of order coming from a unit with the First Law? He'd have been shut down where he stood, without the option of rebooting.

A responsible government would have recalled all Pantheon and Golem units and kept them recalled until the programming was fixed and implemented. This government left them on the street and killed the programmers, and the ones up top were wondering why the city was crumbling?

And at the same time, next to no one was standing up. Next to no one was saying, no, this isn't right, we've had enough. Those few that were were being killed and their neighbors _were allowing it_.

A slight tremor went through Blues' arms: he did not understand that logic chain. Just thinking about all the useless death, enabled by those claiming to be suffering, enabled by those who refuse to stand for themselves…

That now-familiar anger crept into his systems, the now-familiar frustration with the state of this world. And now X would have more questions for him, too.

His processor's efficiency was down another seven percent. He really needed to defrag; the rate at which he would lose efficiency would increase dramatically once ten percent was reached.

The First Law was singing now that he knew that there'd been human casualties: was it their fault, it asked. More data must be gathered, it determined. That must be made a priority, it declared.

And now Blues was getting a headache. The strain on his processor would upset his core before long.

Rocinolle looked up. "Sensei?" she asked. "Sensei, is everything okay?" For him to just have stopped in the middle of working on any one of their mechaniloids…

Rocinolle's voice snapped Blues out of whatever reverie he'd fallen into, though his body language was incredibly muted compared to what a human would have done. He glanced back at her, but shook his head. "Ah, I'm fine. I was just thinking." Even though a Robot Master stopping in the middle of a task while 'thinking' would have been a massive red flag to anyone familiar with his kind.

She nodded. "If you want to take a break, Sensei, that's fine. We've been working on this units pretty much nonstop the past few hours."

A break? That…might not be a bad idea, considering the direction that the conversation upstairs was taking. He considered Rocinolle's suggestion for a few moments, then closed up the mechaniloid. "I think that would be for the best. I'll return to finish this unit and check on your progress." She'd been learning well. Rocinolle was one of the few Reploids he'd encountered that was actually met with some degree of approval.

With those words, he excused himself from the lab and headed for the nearest out to Level Six, which was the ladder down.

* * *

><p>"Is anything even being <em>done<em> to correct whatever went wrong with the patrol units?" X was furious by this point, though his anger wasn't fully directed at the Reploid managing Neo Arcadia. "Or did Copy X just decide on a whim that killing off everything that was even _indirectly responsible_ was the best course of action?"

"Before I left the city, I advised the Judges to take the investigation team we'd assigned to look into the programming error and let them start recoding the Pantheon and Golem programming. I did manage to get copies, so if anyone here is good at translating code?"

The room fell oddly quiet for a moment, and Zero's eyes widened as the comm chatter between the units in the room blossomed into a whole new wave that swept over the entire base. He turned to X, looking for all the world as if he'd walked into a room where he didn't want to hear what was being said.

_The unit in the city had Hoppiders? Isn't…_

_Good with coding? That'd be…_

_I always said I wasn't too keen about…_

_He _is_ far too secretive…_

_Master X said that…_

"X…" Zero said, looking up. "Um…comm lines."

Phantom turned to the blonde. "What?"

X looked over at the Reploid huddled around the charger pods, realizing that they'd been tossing the information out to the rest of the base without any real consideration for whether or not it needed to _be_ released, and gave them a withering glare. "You were right, Phantom," he said, turning his attention back on the Guardian. "There is a progenitor unit here, though I have no idea about the second." He took a step back, looked across the room, and "I'll be back later. I have to go have a word with someone."

The Cyber Elf stormed out of the room in a flurry of sky-blue.

"Master Zero," Phantom said, nuzzling into the elder's comforting hug, "what did I miss?"


	14. Reunion

_There is an unfortunate side effect that comes with being a Cyber Elf, at least of X's variety. Being an entity of pure data, you can't touch things. You risk passing through objects, you can't interact with the world at large, and you can't hit people or the doors they slam in your face. Oh, and seeing that the door is Blues', you can't hack your way past the locking mechanism in an effort to do something other than just storming through the door in the first place._

_Poor X. He's gone through so much in this chapter. He really needs a hug._

_**Disclaimer: **Mega Man and all related characters and information are the property of Capcom Co., Ltd., Akira Kitamura and Keiji Inafune._

* * *

><p>Blues had just touched down on Level Six when the communications network suddenly exploded with new gossip as a result of Phantom's question.<p>

Well.

His room was down the hall still, but Blues stopped in his tracks, head tilted slightly as he listened to the chatter, waiting.

X hadn't bothered with the lift, dropping the two levels down and stalking through the hallway, his aura flickering blue as he moved towards his brother's room.

'_Does anyone know why Master X just jumped down the lift shaft looking like he needed to go hit something?_'

Upstairs, in the lab, Zero fired a wave of '_For the love of…don't you people have anything _better_ to do with your time?_' onto the network. '_I swear, all of you are more wrapped up in gossip trails and hearsay than our Navigators during the Maverick crisis. At least they knew when to shut the hell up and get back to their damn jobs!_'

Blues was glad that they hadn't caught on that he was on the network and could hear them. It was at least providing him with a handy moment-to-moment update of what was going on, but he also did not want to deal with X right as of this moment, not with his head this way and another to look after, so after a moment's consideration, Blues slipped into his room and locked the door behind him.

Though he supposed that X would yell through the door if he had to. It was hard to be comforting when he was already so upset.

X had rounded the corner only a moment before Blues had entered his room, and he was seething, in full Hacker mode, by the time he got to his brother's door. "Blues, open the door!" he said, pressing his energy into the door's locking mechanism. These he knew how to override.

Or, at least, he _had_. Blues apparently felt his own touches were needed and had modified the lock.

After a moment of staring at the added code, X was really starting to wish he could just solidify long enough to _hit something_. "Blues, open the damn door!"

Blues did not respond to X. He could hear him, certainly, and he hadn't heard X so angry before, but there was something else demanding Blues' attention, something far more urgent and upsetting. He was upset himself, and he had to deny each query for a closer link, for a more comforting link, to prevent them from getting caught in a feedback loop. He was having trouble keeping his own feelings in check and if the empathetic bond caused them to feed into how upset each was?

He was hard-pressed to think of a worse time to be caught that way. Even if the denied queries were very, very upsetting.

"Blues, I know you can hear me! Hiding in that room isn't going to save you forever!" X hesitated, holding back from attempting a stronger hack on the door. He didn't want to storm through the door, although the idea was _very_ tempting. "I can understand lying to the Resistance, as much as I hate doing it, because you want to protect yourself, but you lied to me! You let me believe that I'd been overlooking you, not seeing you despite the fact that we're family, and now I find out from my son that you've barely been active a week? What were you _thinking_? Or is this just another one of those things that Rock and I aren't responsible for helping with?"

That opened another wound, and X was debating if staying on this side of the door was really worth the Robot Master's approval. Sure, he wanted his privacy, but with matters quickly thrown this far out of hand…

"Blues, dammit, open the door! I know you were listening, know you heard what Phantom said! There was a second unit with you! There was a second unit that looked like my twin, Blues! Don't act like I don't know what that means!"

X's energy lashed out again, a direct attack against the program holding the door shut against him. "Blues, _where the hell is our brother?_"

Blues paused only a moment, but another flurry of queries and data requests from an alarmed and defensive system distracted him again and he redoubled his efforts at calming the child, trying to pull him back from full-on panic mode even with his memory files so corrupted, with holes in his identity, armaments only half-functioning, and absolutely no armor. Rock also already scanned Blues extensively and he knew what sort of condition the eldest of the Light children was in and that was amplifying his panic.

Blues was successful in shushing the child, but only on the condition that Rock could cling to him, so Blues was stuck bent over the bed, over where Rock was sitting, while the child tangled his hands into the folds of Blues' scarf.

X attacked the lock once more, hit the only thing he could touch, and slammed into the defenses again, unable to chip at the program. "Why are you pushing me away, Blues? I tried to do everything I could to protect you! You're my brother, and as much as it hurt me to lie to them, to tell them that you were from my past, from…from…" X clenched his eyes shut. "Do you know what it was like for me a century ago? I had to watch my family _die_! Every person I cared about, murdered in cold blood in war that had no reason! My first son, adopted though he was, was torn to pieces in front of me! The one person that stood by me through it all, that I cared about more than anything or anyone else, was forced to live with the fact that _his original body_ was the machine destroying our world. My commander died on the battlefield trying to protect me! I had _no one_ when I built Neo Arcadia! Do you understand that? _No one_! I was alone amidst a sea of strangers, and now that I have family, now that I know someone did survive, you let me go this entire time not even knowing that what you were telling me was a lie?"

Upstairs, Zero's eyes had gone wide, memories of a long-forgotten battle bursting into full recollection in his mind at X's words, and the blonde couldn't even bring himself to focus enough to tell whoever it was that was broadcasting X's rant to get away from him and let the elf be.

Throughout the base, questions were flying, even though the comm remained quiet save for X's words reverberating through their audio receptors. A few of the Reploids, knowing only fragmented bits of their history, were left staring blankly at walls at the revelation of the true devastation of the war, others falling to the floor at the shock of hearing X as he was.

In her room, Ciel sat with a hand pressed against her mouth, Milan bowing his head as he continued to provide an audio feed from his connection into her computer terminal. In all the time she had known him, she had never known this side of X, this fearful, broken shell of an android made hero.

The entire security team was silent. Never in their lives had they heard anything quite like this come from X, and to see their champion, their guide in this battle, screaming, venting, letting go of everything…

If only they had known…if only they had been willing to let X down from that pedestal he'd been set on for so many years…if only they'd been willing to see that he was just like them, that he was not this paragon of righteousness that stood as a bastion against all ills without ever breaking.

"I lied for you because I wanted to help you! I lied to them, violated their trust, because you're my _brother_, and, dammit, family is more important to me right now! You and Zero are all that I have left, all that I care to fight for! This world isn't mine anymore! I was not meant for this, not meant for the heights they have elevated me to, and I'm done! I will reclaim the city, but she is not mine to control! I don't want to return to the city to be its leader, to be shunted back onto a throne I never wanted!" X fought against the urge to just crumple to the floor. "All I want, all I care about, is to put the last two centuries behind me and live whatever is left of my existence in the peace that Doctor Light wanted for me! _And all you do is slam the door in my face, lock me out of your life, and expect me to walk away with my tail between my legs!_"

With a whirr and a hiss, the door finally opened. Blues wasn't at the door, however, wasn't even facing X. He was bent over the bed, scooping something up, and a small pair of arms wrapped themselves about his shoulders. He straightened and shifted the weight he was carrying to his hip, the way human parents did with their children that weren't babies, then turned to face X, his face pale as that day he'd had the attack. There was a child in his arms, clinging to him as though to a lifeline, his face buried in Blues' scarf as his shoulders shook each time a quiet sob escaped him.

"I was hoping to let you meet Rock later today, after he had some time to orient himself," Blues' voice was strained and shaky, as though speaking through pain. He hesitated again, but stepped toward X even though it made Rock cling to him more tightly, "but given the circumstances…I reactivated him four hours ago. Only twenty-three percent of his memory files survived. Are newbuilts children to Reploids? They are to us. When I escaped Neo Arcadia, my intention was _only_ to get Rock to a safe place." His own safety came in second, but far behind. "Before either of us says any more, I will ask the individual down the hall to cease broadcasting this." Blues' head turned in the direction of the room. "If you do not, I will evict you from the network and revoke your permissions."

Whatever argument X had been mentally readying died on his lips the minute he saw the small form curled up against his elder brother, and X's body ran cold, his aura finally shifting back to the muted kaleidoscopic whirl of color. All the rage and anger that had been building up, the way he'd been screaming at Blues, and there was a unit behind the door, hearing every last word through the ears of a newbuilt? And not just any unit, but the elder brother that had been at Doctor Light's side, building him all those years ago? "I'm so sorry," X whispered as he stepped back.

Looking down the hall, X saw Menart scuttle back into his room, the shorter Reploid's shoulders hunched as he got clear of the menacing glare Blues was certainly throwing him from behind those sunglasses. A hand reached out from the doorway a moment later, grabbing a small parabolic dish that had been resting on the floor.

X turned back to his brothers, eyes falling on the small form crying into Blues' shoulder. He hadn't missed the strain in the elder's voice, but the crying form in his arms demanded so much more of the elf's attention. Especially when Blues' words had a chance to sink in. Twenty-three percent…the numbers screamed in X's head, and he had to keep his anger in check as fate kicked him in the face with yet another piece of his past. "He doesn't remember me, does he?"

"There is a great deal he does not remember. But no. I've begun working with him on memory recovery, but it's something his systems have to do, not mine. Even his memories of me are spotty," but not so spotty as to distrust Blues, clearly. "There are entire wars he does not recall," Blues' voice never lost that tired tone as he turned and stepped back into the room, glancing back to X as a clear invitation to follow.

"I would have opened the door for you immediately, but I needed to calm him first. He called me down here; he could hear the chatter on the network as well as I," though Blues was clearly glad that Rock had only been listening rather than playing an active role on the network. "They likely know that I am on the network now, or they will once they connect that I could hear the broadcast, but I restricted Rock to the section of the security network I had cordoned off for the time being." Blues really didn't want to leave a newbuilt to his own devices on the network, not when this world had no idea what a Robot Master was and Rock would be getting into _everything_.

"For whatever little it's worth right now," X said, "I am sorry for the way I reacted. I just…" X shook his head, remaining near the door. "I have had enough of deception, enough of betrayal by those I consider colleagues, friends, teachers, partners. I can't…I don't handle things well when I find someone has been" lying to my face "evasive with me."

Rock didn't look up during the entire exchange. He remained curled into Blues' side, his face hidden in the folds of the scarf that covered his older brother's shoulders, his own shoulders trembling every few seconds. Blues ran a hand along the child's back as he sat down on the bed, settling Rock down beside him, letting the child continue to huddle against him. He placed a hand on Rock's head before speaking again. "Come inside, X." Blues supposed he should apologize for being so 'evasive', even though he'd do it all again. "I did not mean to betray you, but what your child said was right. It's been eight days. Eight days and this world is…not like the one I knew. Forgive me if I've been overly secretive," but it was his way. He had to be cautious; he was looking after not just himself, but Rock as well.

X hung back, halo shifting to red for only a moment before the scans completed, and he shook his head. "Both of you are already taxing your systems. I don't want to be the cause for…" he looked at Rock for a moment. "I don't want to be more a problem for either of you right now." Moving only a single step forward, X folded his legs beneath him as he knelt, resting against his ankles. "I've done enough already, especially so to him."

"You frightened him. It is nothing permanent," and as irked as Blues was that Rock was crying, he couldn't lay all of the blame on X. X hadn't known. They were sitting on the blanket that the bundle Blues carried into the base had been wrapped in, and his trench coat was on top of it, rumpled up behind them. "You're not a problem to either of us, so don't think that way. It's just…a transition. As I said, the world is very different." Very different, such a sudden transition, and he'd only been active in it for a week.

"That said, I would rather I keep my distance until he's more comfortable with me being in the room." Blues likely had no idea how much it hurt X to say that. "It is not as if I cannot talk from here."

X looked down for a moment. "I feel horrible admitting this, but part of me is relieved by the fact that you haven't been active this entire time, have only seen the world as it has become, though I doubt that's much better in the long run. Even if your experiences have been mostly negative, you did not have to see the things, experience what I had to go through. There is a terrible comfort in that realization."

Blues nodded slightly, his head tilted down toward Rock as the child finally began loosening his death grip, his systems relaxing back from full-on panic mode. He'd never been around when Rock was newbuilt, wasn't around during those first few years, but he was certain that he and Roll both imprinted heavily on Doctor Light the way Rock was doing on him now. "It may have been better had we been around to give assistance," Blues said as he turned to look to X, "but it's depressing to look back and wish things could have been better. The here and now is the only place anyone has any real power." And Blues thought it'd be better if they focused their faces forward.

X hummed in agreement as he nodded. "That is true." Eyes turned to Rock once more. "It bothers me that he's suffered such a devastating loss, but with…" better the name not be said, just in case, "with the other unit here suffering from a similar issue, he's got a decent chance of recovering those memories, right?" X wasn't sure he could live with an older brother that didn't remember being there for X's own construction.

Rock finally lifted his head, glancing back at X with big, blue eyes. He understood what they were saying, understood the words, but there were large portions of the conversation that he didn't understand, a lot that he had to reach to Blues to ask about. But when he tried to reach to X, there was _nothing there_. Blues saw him reaching, saw him trying, and after a few attempts, caught his metaphorical hand and reassured him: X couldn't be on the network and standing here at the same time. Rock still wanted to try to reach out, but how, when there wasn't anything there?

They were talking physically because X couldn't talk the normal way, and that was strange, but Blues didn't seem to be bothered by it, didn't seem to think that X was sick. His brow furrowed slightly; it didn't make sense. Wasn't it annoying to not be able to communicate normally?

But there was another thing that was confusing Rock, he realized, as he turned the sentence, the word, over in his head. It didn't return with an immediate meaning, but his databanks were thrashed. He'd ask Blues, but X was the one that said it, so, "What's a brother?"

_Never_, X reminded himself,_ think that it cannot get worse._ He struggled to keep his voice steady as he answered. "Do you know what the term family means?" he asked. "Or kin?"

Rock blinked, then looked a little embarrassed. "My databanks aren't fully intact. There are a lot of things missing." He curled into Blues' side again, curling to make himself a bit smaller, still unsure about this strange person who'd been screaming at Blues, making Blues upset. "It's…a social structure? I can't…" He trembled slightly as he wracked his databanks for the word, for the concept, for the definition, but came up with static and nothingness.

X nodded. "It is a social structure. Normally, for humans, family is determined by genetic information or legal documents of kinship." He hoped that wasn't too confusing for the young Robot Master. "For those like you and Blues and me, it often had to do with the ones that built us, since we are not…not made the same way as humans are. The three of us," and he avoided names again to keep from upsetting Rock or annoying Blues, "all have the same designer, were built by the same person. Brother is the word for male kin from the same parent or creator." He looked to Blues to assure himself that he hadn't stepped out of line.

Blues nodded slightly at X's worried glance: he was fine with that definition, though Rock would undoubtedly be probing him with more questions before long.

Rock blinked again, looking X over curiously. "We have the same creator?" He understood that concept, but his brow furrowed again. He felt like…he felt like that was someone he should know, someone he should remember, but he couldn't…

Blues frowned and looked down at Rock again, head tilting slightly as both Robot Masters looked troubled for a few moments. "Doctor Light," Blues finally supplied, aloud so X could know what just happened. "His name was Doctor Light."

X remained still, watching the two, feeling out of place not only because he wasn't able to connect to the network as he was, but knowing that even if he still had his body, the connections forged between Robot Masters were far more than what would ever be available to androids.

A thought struck X at the realization that his brothers were communing over the network. "Blues, that program you gave me. I know that when it's passive, when it's standing by, I can hear. Would I be able to use that, even off the network, as a link point?"

Blues' lips crept into a slow smirk, an almost-smile, and it was one of approval. "Yes, I don't see why it wouldn't."

X nodded, looking for the program file and quickly activating it, the tinted visor he'd designed for the visual feed dropping down over his eyes as the defensive system came online. Waiting, he let the system idle, letting Blues and Rock reach out, connect to him so that he could establish them as friendly units.

Blues was surprised to see the visor flicker over X's eyes, extending down from his helmet. X looked a lot more like Rock than like Blues, though the similarities would be more pronounced without Blues' sunglasses. He hadn't been able to see X physically while on the network due to his own visual settings, so it wasn't expected. Blues reached out first, establishing a connection to X but not pushing for anything further until X was ready.

"You look like Blues," Rock smiled, looking X over. With that visor on, he really did, except his coloring wasn't the same. And he didn't have a scarf. Rock reached out once he felt how Blues did it and oh! With this enabled, he could feel X, though he still didn't feel at all like a Robot Master. He was more eager than Blues was, pushed a little harder for the connection than Blues did.

X felt the connection, like a feather-light brush over his energy, data that wasn't his own pulling close to him, sensing and recognizing him. Blues was restrained, gentle, as if hanging back, but Rock… The younger of the Robot Masters practically crashed into his data flow, the sensation almost like being pounced on.

And there was that humming again, though this time, it wasn't just a single point of sound. Two harmonious melodies floated in X's mind, different enough that X could tell which tone belonged to which Robot Master, but so alike in the same moment that X, had he not known them personally, would have been able to tell from the sound alone they were close to one another, if not kin. He pulsed outward, reached towards those signals with his own energy, watched from behind the visor to see if either responded to his motion.

Blues caught X's energy, deftly responding to it by accepting it, by anchoring the connection and reinforcing it. He was patient and gentle and his movements spoke of a great deal of experience with this.

Rock was a little bit more eager once again, taking hold of X's pulse and pulling it toward himself, helping X along excitedly. It was all very friendly, very eager, as though X was a new friend in the eyes of a young puppy. Neither Robot Master moved in the physical sense, but both were responding to and accepting X without any hesitation. "You should keep this on all the time," Rock said, smiling brightly. Why had X had it shut off to begin with? Wasn't it so much better this way?

X smiled softly at his brother's words, running his data along the connection, anchoring both lines from his brothers as he felt Blues doing to his. '_I'm relatively new to this program. This is the first time I've accessed it while off the network._' Even though he was physically taller than Rock, the strength of their energy, of their signals against his own, made X feel all of three inches tall. He was sure there was a great deal of communication passing between the elders that he was not, could not, be privy to.

'_It doesn't let us link any deeper, though,_' Rock frowned. He'd tried, but it wasn't possible, like X just didn't have the setup for it. That didn't seem fair. He could link to Blues the right way and that was comfortable and reassuring, but X couldn't feel that?

'_It's because of the type of unit he is,_' Blues explained. '_His…function, his directive set, is different from ours, so he was built differently, with separate capabilities._' Rock turned and frowned up at Blues and the elder could already hear the 'but…' without the child even having to say it. Blues shook his head: no.

X smiled despite the disappointed tone of Rock's voice, comforted by the data flow, by the link they were sharing, and he slowly pushed himself to his feet, lowering the opacity of the visor a bit so that he could see while still keeping the program's text displays visible. Moving closer, X closed the distance between them, resting Indian-style a few feet from the bed, hovering a short distance above the floor.

It wasn't until after he'd settled into the new position that he realized Rock likely had no idea how he was levitating.

Rock was staring at X with his eyes wide as saucers, initiating all the scan modes he could think of to try and figure out what X was doing, how he was doing it, and, most importantly, _could Rock do it too?_ Rock shifted in his seat, glancing back at Blues as though unsure. But when the older Robot Master didn't protest, Rock scooted forward on the bed, tentatively, then reached out to touch X.

His eyes became impossibly large when his hand passed through his brother.

X yelped slightly, the arm Rock had pushed through fragmenting slightly. The motion had taken him completely by surprise, and he glared at the offending limb as Rock pulled away, forcing the data to reconstitute. "Sorry about that, Rock," X said, still staring at his own arm. "I hope I didn't scare you. It's just been a while since someone actually tried to touch me without taking into consideration that I'm not…all here."

Closing his eyes for a moment, X forced more of his energy to the surface, forced the limb that Rock had moved through to stabilize, though turning it truly solid was beyond his capabilities. Reaching out as he opened his eyes, he offered the hand to Rock. "Don't push too hard against me, but you should feel some resistance this time."

Rock had been startled by X's yelp, but wasn't discouraged at all, especially once X reassured him, so he reached out a second time, this time more gently, to touch X's arm. Rock blinked and tilted his head, caught between confusion and wonder. "It's tingly. You're all energy? But…" Rock's brow furrowed and, behind him, Blues tilted his head slightly, "but if you're like this," Rock pressed his hand to X's arm again, his fingers almost beginning to pass through, "then how did our maker build you without parts?"

"I…" X had no idea how to broach that particular topic. He blinked behind the visor, hoping that Blues would stop him if he was starting to say too much or upset the robot. "I…was actually made like you and Blues. I had a body, one that you helped to build. Something happened to me, to my body, a few years ago, and I recovered from it by turning into this." He laughed softly as Rock continued to prod his arm. "I explained it to Blues a few days ago, but I guess he hasn't told you yet. I'm…sort of the robot equivalent to a ghost, if you know that term."

Blues had to quickly intervene when Rock's eyes became wide, but not in a way that was full of wonder or curiosity. He reached out with his aura, his connection, to Rock, to help anchor and reassure him before quickly saying, "He isn't dead." When Rock turned his wide-eyed gaze to Blues, the older Robot Master continued, "His mind separated from his body. That's what this manifestation is." Rock had to reach into Blues' systems for answers to a plethora of questions and the elder one granted that access, let Rock delve into his proverbial library for the data he required. After a few moments, the child relaxed, but he cast a worried glance back to X.

X recalled the visor, his right eye turning black as he reoriented the display over the optics, and he quickly got to his feet, a fresh pulse of energy running through his body as he approached Rock. Kneeling at the side of the bed, X carefully wrapped his arms around Rock, hugging him gently. "Don't worry yourself about me. My body is still safe and, given time, I'll be able to reconnect to it." Pulling away, he smirked. "Besides, being like this," he said, spreading his arms as his halo shifted to a vibrant green that matched his eye, "I have my own unique set of special abilities."

And in an instant, there were five Xs standing in the room, all of them breaking into laughter at the expression on Rock's face.

The child looked around at all five of them, scanning them before he even consciously made the decision to, a peripheral he normally used for battle coming online. This was play, though, and after a moment he tackled the real X, but didn't take X's immaterial form into account and fell through him, landing on the floor and rolling to keep from making too much of a dent in the tile. He landed on his back and began laughing.

X dismissed the duplicates as his halo switched over to red again, scanning the laughing robot as he crouched near Rock's head. Reaching down, he attempted to tousle the boy's black locks, the electric charge of his form succeeding only in fluffing Rock's hair where he had tried to touch the ebony fibers. "You okay?" he asked, even though the scan had come back all green—_true_ green, X noted to himself—as the halo began to flicker through the color spectrum once more.

"I'm fine," Rock nodded, sitting up, watching X's halo switch colors from green to red, then back to the spectrum. It felt like a scan, so was that setup a mode for scanning status? He was learning quickly, even just by watching, and Blues wasn't giving any input on Rock's discoveries unless the child had a question: he was content to hang back and monitor Rock as he explored. Rock got to his feet and dusted himself off. He was still wearing the cyan bodysuit that he had beneath the bulk of his armor, though the material used as the base to a Robot Master's armor was deceptively tough.

Frowning, X pulled up the scan data he'd just gotten on Rock, going over a few of the numbers before turning to Blues. "Is the computer linked into just the security network, or are you on the comm here too?"

"Yes, I'm on both." He'd been shamelessly hacking during his 'free time', trying different things, things under the table, moving things around, and as of yet, not one security officer had noticed. He didn't alter anything that would compromise the base's security or inhibit anyone from doing their jobs, but…it was a bit like a prank.

Like a poltergeist, moving things around the house at night.

X nodded, moving for the console and fracturing into a data stream that quickly uploaded to the communications network. Thankfully, the base was quiet, and the moment X loaded onto the net, he'd set the defense protocols to cloak his signal. Looking through the banks of online access signals, X singled out the unit he was looking for. '_Dande,_' he said once he'd established a private line, '_you're off security duty in a little while, correct?_'

'_In a little over twelve minutes, yes, Master X_' he answered. '_Is there something I can help you with? Also, I can't get a fix on your signal location. Is there something wrong with the terminal that you accessed at?_'

'_I'm testing a new defense program before the next major raid against Neo Arcadia,_' he explained. '_Glad to know it works. Anyway…_' X relayed the measurement information he had gathered from Rock's scans, instructing Dande to find a Resistance uniform that would best fit the specified frame and to bring the items down to Blues' room once obtained. '_And I don't want to hear from Blues that the base is busy chatting about this as well._'

'_Understood, Master X. I should be able to get you the requested items within the next thirty minutes._'

'_Thank you, Dande,_' X said before disconnecting. Reforming near the desk, X reached out, reestablishing the link with his brothers, dropping once more to a hovering position near the bed.

Blues was the first to grab the connection again, anchoring and strengthening it with a practiced ease. Rock's tackle wasn't quiet as excited as last time, but he was still happy that X came back. Watching X disappear into the data stream from the interface was…did he have to do that every time he wanted to access the network? Wasn't that annoying? Rock was completely on the security network now; Blues had stashed him away there when he began to get upset, putting him in an isolated section under protection to help calm his as the older Robot Master (his brother!) came downstairs for him. Rock crawled back onto the bed to sit next to Blues and cuddled into his side some.

"It's shocking how quiet the net is right now," X admitted, dropping back into a low hover near the bed, one hand reaching out for Rock. "Dande should be by soon with some clothes for you, since I'm certain you're not too keen on running around in just your undersuit."

Blues nodded at X's comment about the network. "Both Zero and Ciel ordered everyone to mind their own business, essentially," even though Ciel's orders were communicated by Milan. "They remained silent even after that individual stopped broadcasting." And that was said with no small amount of distaste. This wasn't a sideshow, so where did that Reploid get off treating it like one?

Rock looked down at his body, blinking, as though just registering what he was wearing even though he had to have noticed his armor was gone before. "Both of our armors are gone," Rock said, brow furrowing as he wracked his mind for the memories. "I don't remember removing it for maintenance…"

"It wasn't removed for maintenance. It was…lost." Blues tilted his head, sending on a private line to Rock, '_I'll see about getting new armor made._'

'_Yours first,_' Rock returned. '_Your status is—_'

'_It's fine._'

'_That's not fine, even for you,_' Rock frowned cutely up to Blues, almost pouting.

X laughed at the expression on Rock's face, having a fairly good idea from his initial scan of the two as to why Rock was making that face at Blues. "I'm not going to try and guess at what you're talking about," he said, "but it probably would be a good idea for you to get some sleep, Blues. Your system scan earlier was bouncing back a lot of red flags again, and I sincerely doubt you want _both_ of us ganging up on you about taking care of yourself."

Blues' face set into a look of disapproval even as Rock opened his mouth. The older Robot Master clearly would have preferred this subject not be broached, but his glare, rather than being focused at Rock, seemed to be focused on the wall on the other side of the room.

"Sleep?" Rock tilted his head, truly puzzled.

"Wait, what?" X looked at Rock, actually confused by the thought that such a simple and necessary term could have been forgotten. "Sleep," he repeated. "For robots, it's the process of setting your systems into a hibernation stand-by, usually during a charge cycle, to allow your processor time to focus on system repairs and maintenance."

"…Charge cycle?" For _Blues_? Rock's stare only became more blank, his expression becoming more like he was not following X at all. If X scanned Blues, didn't he get a reading on his power source? And why would they need to go into standby to do systems maintenance? Wasn't moving functions to one of the secondary processors much, much, easier?

"I apparently have a lot to learn about the differences in operational mechanics between Robot Masters and androids," X said, shaking his head. "I know that Blues doesn't have a charge cycle. I kind of figured that out the first time I had to provide help settling his core. The reason I mentioned charge cycle is because I'm used to working around androids and Reploids, and we do actually require a charge cycle, plugging into machines like that one," he said, indicating to the pod behind him, "while we sleep. Internal battery system and all. While we're in a charge cycle, we go into a hibernation stasis that allows our processors the time to focus solely on repairs. In the case of one unit here at the base, his sleep cycle is helping his processor recover damaged memory files. For most of the rest of us, it's the time when our auto-repairs are able to kick into full gear to have our nanites repair and rebuild any areas damaged throughout the course of the day." X hoped he wasn't overloading the younger of the robots. "Other than that, it's the time frame where our processors organize and file away the day's data files for storage."

"But…" Rock trailed off, brow furrowing again, taking up all of the data X just provided and lining it up with what Rock already knew, looking for discrepancies to locate the origin of their confusion. Processor, recharge, systems maintenance. Processor. Not _processors_. "Wait, you only have _one_ processor?" How did they manage to get anything done?

"You have _more_ than one?" How did _that_ work?

"I have three," Rock said, holding up the fingers as though he needed a visual aid. "Blues has…four still." Rock had to pause there to look back at the frowning unit to scan him, just to be sure. "The average was two to three, I think, but…" That was the norm he remembered, anyway.

X's eyes had gone wide at the revelation. _Multiple_ processors? It was hard enough keeping a train of thought straight sometimes with just the one! The amount of space taken by a single Reploid processor was almost equivalent to that of the human brain, and the terabytes upon terabytes of data that had to be built in—their base programming—as well as the tons of data that developed after activation—preferred vocal and optical coding, behavioral protocols, memory files, not to mention the judgment and ethics…

'_Aw, hell._'

Rock blinked, head tilting once again. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing's wrong, per se. I'm just…I've spent two hundred years dealing with pseudo-human machines that were meant to blend into human society, so to hear you talk about multiple processors as if it's the norm throws me off. Part of the reason we're equipped with only a single processor is because it makes us operate more like the humans we seek to emulate than the machines we are built as. We can only follow one train of thought at a time, even though some of us do tend to wander in our thoughts. We can't actually perform true multi-tasking, though we are better equipped in some respects to dancing between assignments. Those traits aside, the neural setup we have covers…everything. Base coding, behavioral drives, memory files, nanite control, judgment and ethics development, movement and equilibrium systems. And that's not even a full listing of what's installed or developed over our operational timeframes."

"Our programming is…present on each processor so we can switch between them while another is performing maintenance or defragging, or if we need to reach to another to complete a task, or to calculate multiple things at once," as Blues had done with the Hoppider unit and X's program several days prior, "but…judgment and ethics development?"

X reached out along the link he had with Blues, facepalming as he asked, '_You're telling me my design progenitor has them, too?_'

'_He does. He was activated with them. Doctor Light built nineteen Robot Masters directly,'_ so not counting ones made by other scientists with licensing from Light Robotics, _'and every one of us had the Three Laws. Remember, it was required by law at the time, and if Mega Man didn't have the Three Laws?'_ The implications were disastrous. _'That is why your project was kept secret, why no one knew you even existed. I believe his original hope was for us to activate you once the metaphorical storm had passed, but we were…unable to. Had they learned of your existence at the time, you would have been unilaterally destroyed before your construction completed.'_

X's features darkened slightly, his eyes turning toward the floor. Unlike several of his personal memories from his construction period, the ethical scenario testing he'd undergone from his sealing to his reactivation by Doctor Cain were forever etched into his memory banks. To think that all of that would have been for nothing, have been seen as wasted effort, had he been discovered?

Yet here he was, looking at the older brother that had served as his _direct progenitor_, and he hadn't connected the dots and realized that the Three Laws were in place with this Robot Master as well. '_I feel like an idiot for not realizing that one sooner._' Turning to Rock as he stood once more, X closed his eyes, his data fragmenting as he worked to recode his appearance specs. "Maybe it'll help you to recognize me," his voice spoke from the mass of shimmering data, "if you see me as you and Doctor Light built me. Three centuries ago, I was placed in an ethical diagnostic testing pod, was supposed to be tested for thirty years by the system in a variety of ethics and core judgment scenarios to establish a human-like code of behavior that would free me from the constraints of the Three Laws of Robotics." Flashes of darker blue coalesced in the data, forming into armor over an undersuit almost the exact same color as the one Rock was wearing. A flash of crimson over X's head elongated the red head crystal as the last of his data reformed. "I'm just shocked to know that the robot I was directly based on did not have the same liberties as I was granted after a hundred years in that pod."

Rock's eyes were wide when he took X in—his armor was clearly modeled after Rock's own and, really, they looked so alike…like X was built as an older version of Rock. Flashes of familiarity, of nostalgia, lit up in Rock's aura even though he couldn't trace the source of the feeling, couldn't isolate the memory file. It all came back as static. Uncertain, the almost-newbuilt Robot Master glanced back to Blues, but the eldest of them all inclined his head slightly: yes, this was what X was supposed to look like.

Mystified, Rock stood from the bed again, reached out to try touching X, though much gentler than the first time. His body was still ethereal, still composed of coalesced energy. Like X's force of will alone was causing him to manifest here. "I…" Rock's brow furrowed again as he queried his memory databanks, but it just came back with muted fuzz and nothingness. "I should know you," the way he should have known Doctor Light's name, even if there wasn't a face to go along with that name, "but I can't…" The memories weren't responding, weren't repairing.

It was just static.

When Rock's shoulders trembled slightly, Blues' gaze focused on the child and there was a tug on the connection between the two units, a tug and a call, threaded in with compassion and reassurance, _'Come here.'_ Rock took a shaky step back, just a little bit upset with himself for not being able to call up the memories he knew should be there, and he crawled back onto the bed and curled up at Blues' side again. "It will take time for your systems to begin recovering. Your local backup data was compromised as well, so it can't help." Though that data was more reserved as a reset should a virus actually get through.

X's data flared along the connection line with Blues once more, pulling with it a snippet of a memory file—one of his earliest—and he asked Blues if it would only hurt Rock more to let the child see the images.

Blues considered the images, flipped through them, then decided that no, it wouldn't do any harm. Even if it didn't trigger Rock's memories, it'd do the child good to know this, if only to get to know X better.

X initiated the file transfer once he'd isolated the memory in question, letting the data stream to Rock.

Rock blinked, but initiated the file play after verifying what it was. A memory?

* * *

><p>X's eyes opened, the world coming into a dim, hazy focus for a moment before his optics cleared, ears catching the sounds of footsteps—two sets—coming down the stairs into the lab. Checking his internal chronometer, he called out, "Good morning, Doctor Light. Morning, Rock," though he couldn't see either of the individuals approaching him. There was a slight shudder in the visual feed as the pod X was laying in began to rotate, moving to a more vertical position, though not far enough to drop X from the unit. An aging gentlemen drifted into sight, his hand touching a control on a nearby console, a young boy at his side, and though X couldn't see himself, he remembered as the memory played that he'd smiled at the two of them. "Doctor, what's going on?"<p>

Rock bounced up to X's side happily, though not with the wide-eyed enthusiasm he was displaying right now: he wasn't a newbuilt here. He was a child still, but there was a wisdom in his eyes that the Rock curled into Blues' side didn't have.

"Good morning, X," Doctor Light said with a smile, looking back to the partially-completed android before turning his attention back to the computer monitor. "We're going to do some motor control tests to be sure that everything is working as needed before we continue. How are you feeling?"

"Good. All systems are showing green at the moment. Charge levels are holding at max. Do you need me to disengage from the pod?" X's hand rose then, coming into view, metal and wires exposed, the soft whir of his servos sounding in his ear as his hand moved for the charger cable plugged into the back of his neck.

"Yes, could you? We're going to do a full motor control test, as well as verify your equilibrium system is functioning." Doctor Light nodded, still typing some things in, but Rock stepped forward to help X undo the diagnostic wires attached to his body at various points and help X from the pod.

"It might be disorienting at first since you're not used to getting up and moving around while booting, so use me for support if you begin to lose your balance," Rock advised, taking X's arm as the android pushed himself from the pod.

X took the offered hand, swinging his legs over the side of the pod as his other hand pushed against the metal frame. X was slow, careful, as he pushed himself to his feet, looking down at the shorter robot at his side. His hand flexed, pulled from Rock's, and resettled on the elder's shoulder. "Systems still showing green, Doctor Light. Equilibrium is normalizing, but should I wait before verifying? There's a peripheral asking me if this is vertical baseline."

"Yes, delay verification." Doctor Light finally straightened from the terminal and turned to look at X, his face kind as he spoke. "Walk around for a bit and orient yourself so you're comfortable with it, then verify."

X nodded, the hand on Rock's shoulder tightening its grip slightly as he looked down, testing the motor controls in his leg before taking a somewhat shaky step forward. A few more steps, and X stopped, swaying a bit on his feet.

"Here, hold my hands and I'll help you stay balanced. It's a lot harder without a baseline established, but it's better if we do it this way first." Rock reached up and took X's hand from his shoulder, then moved around to the front of the android and took his other hand, pushing a bit against his arms to help him stay steady. "Ready?"

X's visual feed moved in a slight up-and-down motion as he nodded, eyes locking on the wide, excited blues of his brother. "Which leg first?"

Rock blinked, then looked down at their feet. He moved his right foot back one step, then looked back up to X, "Start with your left." Since they were choosing.

X took a step forward with his left leg, eyes trailing to the floor to monitor his motions. As Rock moved his left leg back, X moved his right forward. The steps were short and a little uneven, but they came a bit faster each time. X winced slightly as he stepped down again, vision centering on the lower part of his right leg. "Something just went yellow on the status boards. And that _hurt_."

Both Doctor Light and Rock frowned and Rock quickly said, "Don't move," as Doctor Light pulled a chair over. It wasn't one of the ones with wheels on the bottom. It wasn't a heavy chair, but it was sturdy enough that X could lean on it. "Which one is it, X?" Rock asked as he knelt down once X was leaning on the chair for balance, looking at X's leg with alert eyes as he entered a scan mode.

"Anterior left servo on the right leg," X answered. "My left, not yours," he amended, gripping the chair as Rock disconnected the plate covering the internal mechanisms of his leg. "The…pain registered near the top connection terminal."

"Once you register a pain, you can dial it down so it's not so uncomfortable," Rock said, "though don't leave anything off completely, otherwise you won't know when something goes wrong." The smaller robot scooted around to see the part of X's left leg that he described as painful. After a few moments, he tilted his head.

"Did you find it, Rock?" Doctor Light asked.

"There's some loose wiring here. It doesn't look like anything tore or ripped, though. I can fix it right here." Rock's variable system morphed his arm into the tool appropriate for affixing the errant wiring, but stopped short of touching the injury. "X, for this, you can turn the pain receptors in the area off until I finish. It won't be pleasant if you don't, and there's no reason for it to hurt while I'm fixing you."

X nodded, quickly navigating his controls and shutting down the receptors in his lower leg. "They're off, Rock," he said, looking towards where his brother was working. "Once you secure the wire, I shouldn't have the problem again, right?"

Rock nodded enthusiastically. "Your auto-repair system isn't fully online yet, but once it is, it will take care of things like this so we don't have to open you up every time. That'll be easier, don't you think?"

"Auto-repair system?" X looked to Doctor Light. "Is that what the nanite control interface you installed last week is for?"

"That's right," Doctor Light said, "or at least, that's their main function. They will also provide you with status updates from within your systems and keep your parts cleaned up..." All kinds of little cleanups, fiddly things that the Robot Masters would have had to be opened up for. It'd be less apparent that X was robotic in nature, less dangerous for him this way.

X watched as his brother fiddled with something he couldn't see, carefully leaning over and looking closer at what Rock was doing.

After several moments, Rock closed the panel on X's leg and straightened up, his variable system morphing back into his arm as he nodded to Doctor Light, then looked up to X. "Ready to try again?"

* * *

><p>When the memory ended, Rock's brow was furrowed, his eyes a bit unfocused as he searched his memory banks. The scenario was familiar somehow, familiar despite Rock not recalling it. He knew X, knew Doctor Light, even if he couldn't remember them. He put a hand to his forehead, his brow furrowed as he queried his data banks once, and again. And again. Rather than static this time, he got an error message: the file was corrupted. Rock's eyes widened and he immediately queued it to be recovered.<p>

Blues' head was tilted as he closely followed Rock's status changes, closely monitored how the younger unit was doing. "You worked with Doctor Light in the lab like that often. That was…your primary objective. At least, it was before the wars started."

Rock nodded slightly, "I remembered that…that I didn't start out as a battle robot. That I was converted. I know it was…the First Numbers, that Doctor Wily took them, but I couldn't remember…it's like, the next thing I know I'm confronting Elec. I don't remember how I got there.

"After Doctor Wily took them, you asked Doctor Light to enable you to fight them to bring them home. You requested that he convert you, that he arm you, so they could come home again," and there was a trace of pride in Blues' voice there.

X smiled as well at Blues' words, though for a slightly different reason.

"What is it, X?" Rock reached out as though to tug at X's sleeve, but his reach was just shy of the Cyber Elf.

"I can see why Blues sees a very strong comparison between you and I," X explained. "When my pod was finally found about a hundred years after I was sealed, I was activated by a man named Doctor Cain. He was very interested in my capabilities, in the fact that I was a robot that had free will, could make decisions based on an understanding of morals and ethical considerations. He and a team of programmers and scientists studied me, and I helped them to understand how I worked so that they could build more like me. We call them 'replicated androids', since the first ones were based off of me, or Reploid for short. For the first…first decade or so, I worked as Doctor Cain's assistant until we started having problems with rogue units. After that, I was assigned to a paramilitary organization tasked with capturing and repairing the problem units. Never took too well to fighting myself, but when the situation required it, I…was there." A hesitation, the months surrounding the Red Alert incident forcing him to trip over his words a little.

Rock nodded, clearly able to commiserate with X on that, "I…I always asked them, I didn't want to fight them, though some of them liked the challenge. Some wanted…some really wanted to kill me, others didn't. But they all fought. Every time Wily struck again…well, my brothers helped, too, and Blues was there, of course, but every time…"

Every time, the world called for Rock to don that armor, called for him to become their beacon of justice. Called for him to…Rock looked down at his lap.

"I'm sorry if I brought up bad memories," X apologized. "If there's—"

X's words were cut off as a knock sounded against the door a half-second before the bell chimed.

"That's probably Dande with the clothing I requested for Rock," he said, looking to Blues. "Should Rock and I move out of sight while you answer the door?"

"That may be for the best," Blues said at length as he stood from the bed, guiding Rock to the corner of the room that wasn't in immediate sight from the door. Once X also moved out of sight, Blues moved to the door and allowed it to unlock and open.

Dande bowed, holding a pile of clothing to his chest as he did so. "Blues-dono, here are the items Master X requested. I hope that they meet with your satisfaction," he said, offering the pile to Blues as he straightened.

"Thank you, I'm sure these will be fine," Blues said with a nod to Dande as he accepted the clothing. Just by glancing them over, they looked like they'd fit Rock.

Dande nodded his head before turning and leaving.

Blues stepped back from the door, then turned his back to it as it closed and locked with a quiet whir behind him. "Alright Rock, come here." He doubted that Rock couldn't dress himself—that kind of data was still mostly intact—so when the child came back over, Blues just handed him the bundle. He didn't notice how wide-eyed Rock became when the door's code scrambled and locked.

Rock looked through the clothes first, blinking when there was even underwear in there even though, really, he wasn't detailed enough to need it. He sort of shrugged and began pulling the bodysuit off with no mind whatsoever to X and Blues.

X smirked, holding back a laugh, as he turned away from the robot, allowing him a modicum of privacy while he changed clothes.

Blues did the same, stepping over to the computer terminal to check the status of the little hacking program he'd begun toying with. Even though honestly, it didn't feel awkward to him the way it may have to a human.

After a few minutes, Rock was dressed, though he was still fiddling with the belt when he looked over to X and Blues, "Is this the uniform everyone here wears?"

X nodded as he turned around, pleased to see that the clothing did fit Rock well, although the pants were a bit baggy. "Most everyone," X said. "Those that don't are usually wearing modified versions of the uniform tailored to fit their own tastes. A few have their own outfits, though, so it shouldn't be too much of a shock to see someone not wearing it."

Rock nodded, it looked like a uniform. It was a lot more layers than he was used to and he bounced in place a few times, adjusting his movement programming to contend with the new clothing. He didn't want to trip and fall just because he was wearing new shoes.

X looked to both his brothers, closing his eyes for a moment as he began the change back to his normal Cyber Elf form. Once he had returned to his original appearance, he turned to Blues. "Blues, I know that it's…not something you may be comfortable with, but I think it would be for the best if we addressed the Resistance, explained why it is I've been covering for you." He hoped Blues wasn't glaring daggers at his computer. "And it might be good to let Rock socialize, since I remember him being the happy, outgoing type. It might prove useful for the recovery of his memory files."

The computer was fortunate that it wasn't a sapient being, or it may have been sad that it was being glared at so vehemently. Overall, Blues did not have a very high opinion of most of the Resistance members, but X was right. He did need to explain to them and Rock did need to socialize. He couldn't be expected to keep to himself, it was against his nature. That would truly be unfair. And so, Blues straightened from the computer terminal, frowning as he looked to X, but not quite glaring. "…Yes, that may be for the best."

X moved for the door, not even waiting for it to open as he walked right through the metal and down the hallway to Menart's room. Considering that a good portion of the base would not be able to leave their posts to attend to them, he needed the troublemaker to put his antics to good use. "Menart," he called out, drawing close to the door. "Menart, I'm not here to yell at you. I actually need to ask for a favor."

The door swished open, the young Reploid looking at his shoes as he moved closer to X. "I'm…I'm sorry about earlier, Master X. I just…"

"I'm not asking for an explanation now, although my brother may want one before this is all said and done." X smiled at the Reploid to reassure him. "I need you to bring the dish with you. I need to fill the base in about recent events, and your assistance with this would be greatly appreciated."

Menart nodded, rushing back into his room and returning a few seconds later with the small parabolic array. "If it's alright with you, Master X, I'll plug up when we're…wherever we're going."

Blues stared at the door, his frown deepening. Of _course_ X could go through the door. He'd seen X move through objects; Rock just passed through him. Of course he could go through the door.

Part of him wanted to just…slam his head into the wall, but that might worry Rock.

And Rock was already worried with the amount of frustration exuding from him.

"You need to defrag," the child whispered quietly, curling an arm around Blues' and tugging slightly. "How long has it been?"

"I'm fine," He'd been much worse. Rock was ready to protest, so he steered him toward the door and out into the hall, where X was speaking to that eavesdropper. The door slid shut and locked behind them and he approached, expression unreadable as Rock clung to his side, eyes darting around curiously.

"C'mon, Menart," X said, urging the Reploid toward the lift. "Go call the lift and hold it on this level until we get there, okay?" Turning as the indigo-haired unit bolted down the hall, X smiled at Rock and Blues. "Let's get going. The sooner we get this mess sorted out, the sooner the both of you can get some rest. I'm certain that you both need it." The data from the scan and Phantom's words echoed in his mind, and he looked to Rock. "Although, come tomorrow, I may take you topside with Blues so you can get some sun."

Continuing down the hall, X noticed that there was a new fob on Zero's door, as well as one on the door next to it. Shaking his head, he moved for the lift, waiting for his siblings to board before turning to Menart. "Signal for the fourth level," he ordered.

A soft nod, and the lift began its ascent.

Rock glanced up at Blues, and in a private line, he asked, _'Why does he think I need to go to the surface?'_

'_Your core is solar charged,'_ Blues replied as the lift began its ascent.

Rock's brow furrowed again, confusion flitting across his eyes, _'But…aren't they hiding underground? I can charge off of you or the pods here if we change the plugs, can't I?'_

'_You could, but it would be best to get an idea of how well your solar intake is functioning. That was one thing I was unable to secure parts for in the allotted timeframe.'_ Blues' voice was apologetic.

'_You already did a lot,'_ so don't be sorry you couldn't do this. Rock tugged slightly on Blues' arm as he said it.

The four remained in silence as the lift moved two levels up, and X hovered off as the lift locked into place. "Go on ahead and get the broadcast rig set up," X instructed Menart. "If Raul is still in Cerveau's lab, let him know we need him to stay for another recording." If the Garm wasn't there, he'd have to have someone request it be sent back up.

Zero looked up as a shorter unit bolted past him, a small dish in hand that he was quickly plugging into one of the ports on his neck. Shrugging, Zero looked down at the small piece of metal he'd gotten from Rocinolle a moment ago as he continued toward Cerveau's lab, hoping that he'd done good enough in color-matching it to Phantom's existing armor. He heard footsteps behind him, but didn't bother to turn around to see who it was.

"X," a child's voice asked. His voice wasn't overly loud, but he wasn't exactly whispering, "who's the lady with the pretty hair?"

That time, Zero did stop, looking over his shoulder to see who it was that had mistaken him for a female model.

And stopped dead in his tracks, ebony eyes going wide.

X hadn't been able to hold back the chuckle that had escaped him. That was, as best as he could figure, the thirty-ninth time someone had mistaken Zero for a female from the back. "That's an old friend of mine, Rock. His name's Zero."

Blues' posture had become immensely rigid, but he didn't make a threatening move toward Zero. Instead, his systems swung into alert since a possibly-hostile unit was in the near vicinity. Rock picked up on that and blinked, some of his own peripherals going into alert, but Rock smiled.

He'd made friends with probably-enemies before.

Rock didn't seem to pick up that mistaking Zero for a female model was a faux pas and, instead, greeted the android brightly. "Hello!"

Zero waved at Rock, though he hadn't made a move to approach the smaller unit—_He looks so much like X_—considering what had happened the last time he'd encountered the other that was accompanying X. "Hey," he finally answered.

And that little unit was clinging to Blues' side, clearly feeling safe while close to the other. Rock did query Blues about the justification for the alert against Zero and—oh. _Oh._ A Wilybot? Rock's scattered memories included times when he worked together with Forte, included times when the Wilybots were genuinely nice to him, so Rock coded Zero as a possible threat, but an unlikely one, several pegs lower than what Blues had him coded as.

"X, who…?" Zero pointed to the shorter unit, immensely surprised. They had recovered another one? When? Where did this kid come from? And mistaking him for a female aside, _why did he look so much like X?_

X smiled, resting a hand carefully against Rock's shoulder. "My brother," he said. "They both are. I'm not too sure what Menart did and didn't relay, but…" He shrugged.

Zero was honestly torn. Half of him wanted to walk up to the robot and shake his hand, hug him, make some motion that would indicate that he was friendly, that he meant no harm. The other half was trying to goad him into running, preferably in the opposite direction, from the unit who was glaring at him through his sunglasses.

"I…I have to get back to Cerveau. He's working on repairing Phantom's armor and needed fresh supplies to fix the gash I left."

"That's fine, Zero," X said. "We were just headed that way ourselves."

Rock was still smiling, oblivious to how displeased Blues was with this entire situation. Or rather, he felt it, but he was used to Blues not liking random strangers, used to Blues' inability to trust others. Or was it his unwillingness? It was part in parcel with who Rock understood Blues to be.

Rock thought that Blues just needed some time.

Blues, however, actually took a step back. "The lab?" Blues asked. He knew that that Guardian, Phantom, was most likely still in the lab. Two flagged units at once? With Rock as he was? Absolutely not. Zero here was more than enough.

"Blues, where else would we be going? I need somewhere that's relatively open to avoid being crowded, even though most of the base is not really welcome in the lab since Cerveau is working right now. Besides, I'm fairly certain Phantom would like to know that both of his uncles are alive and well. If you could have seen how panicked he'd gotten when we didn't get what he meant by progenitor unit…" X smiled at Rock. "And despite how you tend to be, Blues, I'm sure Rock would like to meet one of his nephews."

Zero had, of course, taken the opening and had bolted for the lab. Even if Blues was going to be in the room, he'd make sure that he was somewhere on the opposite side of said room by the time they arrived.

Blues hesitated…what X was saying made sense, of course, but at the same time…

"Blues…it's not for maintenance," Rock's voice was quiet even as his grip on Blues' arm tightened slightly, "so it should be okay, right?" Rock knew that that was the main reason why Blues was not okay with the lab. He doubted Blues stepped foot in here unless he absolutely needed to.

It took X a second to register why his eldest brother was locking up at the idea of going into a lab, and then the looks exchanged between Rock and Roll when the girl had mentioned to Blues that he could have just gone into the lab came to mind. "Blues, I'm not trying to goad you into the lab for anything. I just want to sit down with the Resistance, let them know why it was so important to me to cover for you. I'm not being a very effective commander, or a good one for that matter, by lying to the people that are looking up to me." It didn't help that they'd probably heard his admission that he didn't want to reclaim leadership over the city. "Come on," he said, moving for the lab, hoping that Rock would be able to get Blues to follow.

There was a lot of communication going on via link, but it still took a few moments before Blues began moving again, though now he looked like he honestly half-expected to be jumped.

Something else X had said now bubbled to the forefront of Rock's thoughts and he tilted his head, considering. "X, what's a nephew?"

X's face made quick friends with the palm of one hand. If 'brother' hadn't been…

Eyebrows furrowed as the full weight of the situation hit X. "Blues, if Rock doesn't have the archived data to know what family is, what was he registering _you_ as when you reactivated him?"

Rock actually opened his mouth to respond, but Blues nudged him to silence him. "There…isn't an actual human word for it. Our…" Blues trailed off, frowning as he struggled for the words. "The best word for it is master, but the human understanding behind the word isn't…the correct definition. It's just an approximation. But to us, the unit doing the mastering is the superior unit. That unit is the one doing the direction. The subordinate unit, the one being mastered, is receiving direction to build strategy sets that they can then apply. The master relationship between Robot Master and robot is different from the one between just Robot Masters, but the basic concept is the same. Rock was registering me as his 'master', though it's more like a blend of that, caretaker, teacher, and family member. We…do not have family in the human sense of the word. The foundation of our social structure is based around that in its place."

X mulled over the information for a moment, letting it sink in. From a machine perspective, the idea made sense, but for him, when he'd spent his life being treated as a human, or very close to one? The only true comparison that he had was the hierarchy in the Maverick Hunters, but the extent to which one Reploid served as 'master' to another was limited only to the scope of Unit Commanders and events on the battlefield. Living with that mindset from day to day, regardless of whether or not they were on duty?

X realized he would have lost his mind and Zero's head would have exploded from the sheer overload of ego.

"Of course," Blues added, almost as an afterthought, "should the Master prove inept, the subservient unit can challenge them. _Will _challenge them. The hierarchy is chosen in that way. It is never set in stone and _does_ change when weakness is shown," though Blues didn't seem too concerned about Rock toppling him, "but this has always been the nature of my relationship to Rock," so it wasn't anything new. They were picking up in the same manner they'd left off, lost memories or no. Everything in its place, a perfect harmony.

X chose to ignore Blues' statement, refused to allow himself to grow aggravated at the thought that Rock might have been left without the knowledge that he and Blues were related at all had X not dropped the 'brother' term during his last rant. He turned his attention back to Rock. "Remember how I told you that you and I are brothers because we have the same designer? I have four children, units that have parts of my programming and that I helped to build. Because you're my brother, you are my children's uncle, and the one child here with us, one of my sons, is your nephew. Do you understand the concept?" If there wasn't a clear family structure, X wanted to at least make sure the concept made sense.

Rock nodded slowly, mulling the data over. These kinds of ties were important, even if Blues' experiential data sets discarded them as superfluous. Rock understood enough about the world to know he needed to think for himself, and Blues wasn't actually trying to push him to think one way or another. This was clearly very important to X, and X was someone who ought to be important to Rock. Someone who _was_ important to Rock. So this was important, too. "So you're that unit's maker, I am that unit's uncle, and he is my nephew?" That wasn't too hard to remember. "And then, he is Blues' nephew, too?" Rock looked back to Blues for confirmation and smiled when the older unit nodded shortly.

X nodded, kneeling a bit to drop to eye level with Rock. "There are three more," he said. "They…aren't able to be here with us right now, but you have three more family members through me. Two of them are my sons, and the third other is my daughter. That's the female term for a child. She's your niece." X honestly hoped he'd be able to reunite the family on good terms. "The nephew you have here, his name is Phantom. He's…" X smiled at the thought. "He's like me in that he's the baby of the family, the youngest of the siblings."

Rock wasn't sure exactly how to categorize them in Robot Master terms when none of the units here could link properly, none but Blues, but he understood that they were important in the same way that Blues was. Rock nodded, wondering why the others weren't here, too, but a feeling like a warning originated from Blues' side of the link, so Rock didn't. Maybe it wasn't the best time to ask. "Can we go inside, then?" Rock did want to meet this one, even if Blues' feeling about it was…oddly static. Was he blocking it? Uncertain, Rock glanced up at Blues, but his expression was as neutral as ever.

"If you'd like," X said, continuing toward the lab. "I'm certain he'll be happy to meet you," beyond overjoyed to see them both _alive_, "so let's go in and get settled. I've got a bit of explaining to do to the rest of the people here."

Rock threaded his arm around Blues' a bit more securely as they followed X to the lab, stepping closer to the older unit: there were a _lot_ of strange units here.


	15. Questions

_Question and answer sessions and open discussion forums are a great way to clear the airwaves. Until someone says something so completely out of line that what started as a means of explaining things morphs into the biggest pile of frustration on the net. For those of us reading, we know the 'gems' the internet provides in terms of discussion boards gone wrong. For the members of the Resistance, it's asking the wrong thing of the unit managing their network. And getting summarily glared at._

_In advance: Blues, we are so sorry._

_Also, I'd like to note that there is some intermittent Japanese thrown around in here, but never more than a short phrase, and only three times. I am including translations at the chapter's end. In all honesty, I am cautious about including bits from a language other than the main one the story is posted in, so if this happens to really bother you, I'd like to know._

_**Disclaimer: **Mega Man and all related characters and information are the property of Capcom Co., Ltd., Akira Kitamura and Keiji Inafune._

* * *

><p>Phantom looked up as Zero turned from the table where he was still laying, free of the restraints that had been holding him down before, and his eyes went wide as Blues and Rock followed X into the lab. Pushing Zero away from the table, he half-jumped, half-tumbled from the table into a kneeling lump on the floor. "<em>Aisumimasen!<em>" he cried, pressing his forehead against the cool metal of the floor. "Aisumimasen, Blues-dono!"

Rock almost eeped at the sudden movement and grabbed onto Blues' arm with both of his, jumping slightly, thoroughly startled by the display. He blinked, this one's display reminding him of another unit, though he couldn't quite…

_Shadow Man._ It came in a rush. This one reminded him of Shadow Man.

Blues stopped short at Phantom's sudden movement, but didn't take a defensive stance, even if Blues was now positioned somewhat between Phantom and Rock. This unit—this child, he realized, as he was finally able to scan him—was unarmed, unarmored, completely prostrated on the ground, his neck bared, and begging for forgiveness in the language of the country Blues was activated in. The primary human language he was accustomed to using.

As absolutely livid as he was that they'd been injured so, it'd be beyond contemptible to refuse to move forward from here. He didn't need to trust this unit, but he could forgive even if he would never forget.

Only fools forget.

So Blues inclined his head and said, "Phantom_. Tatte yo."_ He'd at least hear him out.

Phantom pushed himself up, slowly so as not to incite the progenitor, and sat back against his heels. "My most humble apologies, Blues-dono, that I did not try harder to protect you both. I do not know what of my story you know or heard, but I spoke the truth. I tried to reason with the copy, tried to sway him, but he would not listen, would only return with threat of retirement if I continued to try and place your safety, your lives, above those of the Neo Arcadians." He bowed again, not even knowing how to truly express his anguish at the events that had unfolded in the city.

"I heard the entire exchange via the Garm unit," Blues said, his head tilting slightly, ignoring the others in the room and their shocked expressions. "I'm afraid to say that he is…completely inept. As I am certain you are now aware." If the copy hadn't done such a spectacular job of making enemies of the Robot Masters?

Phantom nodded, pushing himself a short distance off the floor. "I regret my own failings in understanding, in realizing that the thing masquerading as my father was not who he played at being, and I apologize again for explaining my situation to my father. It seems that things have…become tumultuous here since I tried to explain things."

X moved to Phantom, kneeling next to him and resting a hand against his back. "Phantom, get up. Please. _Tatte yo_." He pressed his energy into his son, tried to reassure the Reploid that it was okay. "I'm not sure how Blues may feel about you approaching him or Rock right now, but stand up. Look at them. They're alive and well, here, whole, with us." His voice was resonating with joy at his next words. "Stand up and say hello to your uncles, Phantom. Properly."

Rock unthreaded his arms from around Blues' and amazingly, the older unit didn't protest, not even when Rock crossed the distance over to Phantom to give him a hug. Rock wanted to link to this one, to say hello for real, but they couldn't and that was just…

No wonder humans were so physically demonstrative. How else could they _feel _each other?

"This way is hello, too," Rock said, giving Phantom a squeeze.

Phantom had still been on his knees when Rock had approached him, had felt a momentary fear that this one was going to hit him, even as little and adorable as he appeared, looking even more now like his father's brother now that his synth-skin had been replaced. When the arms had wrapped around him, pulled him close for an embrace, Phantom couldn't hold back the tears. Tears of relief, of joy, fell from his eyes against the soft fabric of Rock's uniform, jagged cries that sang with overtones of so many emotions tore from his throat, and he wrapped his arms around the robot, held him close, embraced his uncle for the first time.

Zero remained where Phantom had pushed him, hadn't moved even when Rock had drawn near to him and Phantom both. As he watched the Guardian fall to tears in the arms of the young robot, he couldn't help but wonder if X, when he'd been building Phantom all those years ago, had meant for the youngest of his children to look so much like Rock.

The glare that he was sure would burn right through him if he moved was the only thing that kept the android from joining the cuddle fest right in front of him.

Blues let Rock do the hugging. Blues had never been physically demonstrative and while yes, he let Rock and Roll hug him all they wanted (usually), he was not the one to initiate. He continued scanning the unit X claimed as his child, not just checking to be certain he wouldn't try anything (he'd be a massive fool and a terrible ninja to do it in a room full of witnesses), but also scanning his status and amending his threat level to something less than "kill on sight". Once Phantom was categorized into roughly the same threat level as Zero, Blues finally removed the block keeping Rock from feeling what he thought of the situation.

But seeing that Phantom had truly been worried was…he hadn't been able to scan them while on that table in Neo Arcadia, and poorly placed cameras were his only view. If he miscalculated this one that badly, it was possible he miscalculated the other in the room, even if he was completely correct about Copy X.

When Phantom started crying into Rock's vest, the child blinked, surprised and at a bit of a loss of what to do. He couldn't link to this unit, so he couldn't comfort him the normal way. When Blues hadn't been able to do that for him earlier, due to not wanting to create a feedback loop when so much else was going on, Rock's anxiety peaked and Blues came downstairs to him. But Rock was already here with Phantom, so maybe just hugging him was okay? Was that right? He glanced back at Blues, reached along the line to the elder model for advice.

Blues returned that Rock was doing it right, but sometimes people needed a few minutes to calm down. It would pass, so Rock should keep doing what he was doing.

Phantom's arms drifted down to the middle of Rock's back, a shuddering sigh escaping him as he tried to rein his emotions back in. The progenitors—both of them!—were safe, protected, under the guardianship of his father and the Resistance soldiers. And his father's words had not been missed. Phantom pulled back a little, struggled to smile, and whispered, "I haven't been told your name, but it's good to meet you, uncle."

Rock blinked, then turned a little red, "Oh! I'm sorry. I am DLN-001. My name is Rock. X told me your name is Phantom, right?" He tilted his head, pulling back just slightly from Phantom so he could look at him as he spoke.

"Father told me a great deal of his past," Phantom said, "but I do not recognize your serial numbers at all. I don't remember there being a DLN series."

X shook his head, and Phantom looked to him at the motion.

"What?" he asked.

"I never told you because _I_ could barely remember. The DLN line…" He stopped, looking to Rock, then Blues, before continuing. "The DLN line was produced over three centuries ago by a man named Doctor Light, your grandfather." Kneeling again, he moved until he was roughly eye level with the two, then pointed to Rock. "You're currently hugging my direct progenitor."

Rock didn't seem to think there was anything amazing or surprising about this, so he chirped up with, "And Blues is _my_ direct progenitor. X was the youngest of us all, right?" Rock looked back to Blues for confirmation.

Blues nodded slightly. "Yes, his construction began just before…the Seventh War, if I recall, but did not complete until well after the Tenth." So even though more DLN series Robot Masters were produced in the interim, they were completed and activated while X was still a work-in-progress.

Rock blinked, then looked back at X, "What was your serial, X?"

X stopped for a moment, but then hung his head a little. "I was never given one," he admitted. Even though a product of Light's incredible skill with machines, X had never been given a place on the family line in the way that all the others had. He shrugged. "Does it really matter? It's not like anyone failed to recognize me as a Light robot after I was found."

"I think it was because you weren't a Robot Master, though arguably, your name being a mathematic variable could function as a serial number of sorts." Blues shrugged very slightly as he spoke.

"But—he needs a number! Where did they leave off at?" Rock whirled around to face Blues, teetering on his feet so that he had to place a hand on the floor to maintain his balance.

"…The main number line left off at eighty, though there were…twenty or so units from lines numbered separately, not to mention that Time and Oil weren't included sequentially."

Rock considered this. "But if his name was a variable, wouldn't DLN-X work, too?" Eighty-one was such a lonely number and Robot Masters almost always came in sets.

"Wouldn't be the first time I've heard of a variation in serial," X admitted, standing as Phantom did the same, the Reploid wiping the tear trails from his eyes. "Although I can't honestly say that I need one, I'd be happy to take the assignment as DLN-X. Just remind me that I need to get the serial branded after I get my body back."

"Branded?" Rock got to his feet as well and returned to Blues' side, but looked back to X curiously with the question.

"Branding just means laser-inscribing a Reploid's serial number somewhere on their armor. It became standard practice shortly after production lines were started. Most of the first gens were DCR models, and it's blown into a cascade of separate serials since then." X looked to Phantom. "His serial is AXR-004. Android X Replicate zero-zero-four, since he's the fourth of the units I claimed direct production responsibility for."

Phantom finally found his voice. "Get your _body back_?" he asked, incredulous. "I realized that something was off, but…"

"My body currently rests at the topmost level of Sanctum Yggdrasil as the final seal on Dark Elf's prison."

Rock was considering what X said about the serial numbers, but he did perk up at what X said about his body. Dark Elf? He glanced up at Blues for that, quickly getting permission to access his systems for whatever data he may have gathered on that topic, which wasn't much. But the Dark Elf was a very, very bad thing? Or a good thing that was corrupted? And X wanted to cleanse her if he could, then reclaim his body?

Could they help?

Phantom had lost his voice again at X's admission of where his body was. To know that he'd been that close, _that close_, to his father's real body for _four years_?

X waved his hand. "We can discuss that more later," he said to Phantom. "Right now, I'd like to get the airwaves cleared with the Resistance. Zero, anything on the comm net?"

Zero shook his head. "There's been occasional chatter, but people are being quiet. Only thing I'm hearing is the echo of us talking."

"Well," X said, "that at least verifies that Menart is broadcasting on the public channel. Blues, you can probably tell if there are private lines running. Anything?"

"Now that you asked me? No, they all fell dormant." Blues smirked slightly, one hand resting lightly on Rock's shoulder as the child leaned slightly against him. The link between Rock and Blues was still active, of course, but there was no chance of _that_ being closed.

Shaking his head, X turned to Menart. "I don't recall telling anyone to be quiet, but I am at least thankful to know that some of you can actually stop talking long enough to bother listening." Aimed mostly at the security team, of course. "Milan, Alouette, if either of you are on the comm net, can you get Ciel and bring her up here? I don't want her having to deal with a relay point when it'd be easier for her to talk in person."

Zero nodded a moment later. "Milan's on the comm, he's bringing Ciel now. Alouette's on the way here from her room." The blonde motioned to Phantom. "He doesn't have access yet, does he?"

Several looks were exchanged between the progenitor units, both frowning slightly before Rock relaxed again. Blues pushed into a part of the communications network, cordoned it off so that it was blanketed and secured like the place he created on the security network, then deposited Rock there so he could listen, too.

After Rock's upset, Blues had sequestered him in an isolated, calm place to help him relax, help his systems come down from full-on defensive mode. There were layers of encryption wrapped around the smaller Robot Master's signal and Rock was busying himself by gnawing on them, breaking through them one by one. It was good practice, a good evaluation for how much of that aspect of his function Rock remembered. It'd give Blues an idea of what would need to be taught.

And it was a game to them, something fun to distract the child with.

Rock settled himself on the sequestered portion of the comm network before resuming his efforts at undoing the encryptions, but he could still see beyond the protective bubble just as clearly as though it was a one-way window. They couldn't see him, but he could see them. He scanned the occupants of the network at the same time, tilting his head slightly as he told X of Phantom, "I don't feel him on the network at all."

"You wouldn't," X explained. "He won't be given the access codes to any of the base's networks for a while. While he is my son and has been honest about his intentions and his actions, the Resistance is far more important than my personal feelings on the matter. It's risky enough to know that someone from Neo Arcadia got their hands on our base's coordinates," and there was a momentary glance towards Blues at that, "but I'll at least give Phantom the benefit of the doubt that he's the only one from the city that knows that we're even here."

Sitting as he dropped into a low hover, X looked around the room for a moment. "Zero, can you do me a favor and verify a private link on the comm network with everyone currently logged on? I know that's got you dealing with about forty links, but I'm going to need a moderator for this." And he was fairly certain neither of his siblings would do so.

Zero shrugged, getting at least a dozen requests before he'd even had a chance to answer.

"So what is this all for anyway?" Canard asked.

"I…said a few things that I'm fairly certain need explaining," X admitted, "and I'd rather address those questions in an open forum, in a way where the questions that others have can be answered."

And X's words only reinforced the wisdom in Blues' decision to remain hidden on the network. He saw the rapid-fire requests sent to Zero and frowned at X. He knew that X wasn't the only one that was going to be questioned here.

He vetoed the impulse to just leave right now. It wouldn't be worth the ensuing drama.

Even if he was liking this situation less and less with each passing second.

Zero moved for the table that Phantom had been on, reaching out and poking the Guardian. "C'mon and sit down, Phantom," he said. "And would everyone else sit down? This isn't a priority alarm or mobilization briefing, so you don't need to look like you're going to bolt for the nearest teleport pad the minute someone says 'Maverick'."

X snorted softly. Of all the times for Zero to recall Hunter protocol about standing during a meeting… "Zero does have a point. Cerveau, you have chairs for everyone, no?"

"Of course, Master X," Cerveau smoothly replied. There were multiple terminals in the med lab, each with its own chair, along with chairs near the workbenches and examination tables. They were all on wheels, which often delighted newbuilts. He grabbed them two at a time, distributing them to everyone in the room and setting three aside for Ciel, Milan, and Alouette.

Rock was testing the chair out, bouncing in it a little bit as it rolled slightly with his movement, not at all used to sitting on a surface with so little friction against the floor. He didn't start spinning or anything the way a human child might, but it was clear from his wide eyes that he was calculating all kinds of applications for the chair.

Fortunately for the chair, sidling back up next to Blues was a higher priority to Rock, especially with all the strange units in the room, though he understood that X knew all of them. None of them could be linked to. It wasn't even that they were ignoring him. It was like he was looking to visit and there was no door to knock on. How did they let people in?

Ciel walked into the room, Milan and Alouette only a few steps behind. When she saw all the units already in the room sitting down, including Phantom, who was moving to sit on the exam table next to Zero, she made a beeline for one of the three empty chairs.

Milan dropped into the chair next to Ciel. He'd been surprised to see the second unit with the one that had escaped from Neo Arcadia, but after the transmission of X's outburst, he figured it best to remain quiet until the forum started.

Alouette moved quietly through the room, her wide eyes falling on the young Reploid that was nuzzling up to the older unit that had come to the base the previous week. She'd not seen much of the elder, and the smaller unit was completely new. "Hi," she said, the grip on her stuffed animal tightening a bit. "My name's Alouette," she said softly. "What's yours?"

Rock blinked, but smiled at Alouette. "I'm Rock. It's nice to meet you, Alouette." He'd wrapped his arms around Blues' again, his shield arm if Rock thought about it, but he did straighten some to answer Alouette. He wanted to curl up on the chair and cuddle down some, but he didn't think he could, not with the wheels. The uneven weight distribution and movement would push him away and probably make him fall. Even sitting up straight, Rock was small enough that his feet only just brushed the floor, the soles of his shoes barely making contact.

Alouette smiled softly as she programmed in a name tag for this new unit. She looked as if she were about ready to say something, but stopped and turned, moving for the free chair on Ciel's other side. Almost mimicking Rock's motions, she cuddled up to her stuffed toy and slid the chair closer to Ciel.

X nodded as the youngest of the Reploids finally settled in. "I am certain that I need to explain my actions," he said, "especially in light of recent events. I also need to apologize to everyone, but I'm certain that apologies are not really as important right now. The reason I asked everyone to link along private lines to Zero was because I need him to field the questions, to ask for those of you who have responsibilities keeping you away from speaking with me directly. Now, if you'd each start figuring out what you need to ask, we can get this whole mess sorted out before everyone has to pod for the night."

Zero blinked for a moment, sorting the message files he'd been sent. "Do I need to provide names?"

"No. I'm certain they'll know which question was theirs. I wouldn't doubt the event of question redundancy either."

"Okay," Zero said. "First question is…Why haven't we heard about these supposed 'siblings' of yours until now, Master X? And how have you verified their connection to you?"

"Aside from the serial numbers? Or are you including those in your query?" Blues answered the question almost lazily while Rock cuddled into his side. "X has memories of being worked on, _memories of being built_, that include Rock. His systems recognized my ID when I pinged him on the network in Neo Arcadia, and I his. We were deactivated and assumed dead for centuries. Does it come with any measure of surprise that he did not bring us up?"

"Blues is right. I recognize them both for who they are, despite it being so long since I had last interacted with either. Additionally, there's the factor of their operational ages. Despite physical appearances, both are actually older than I am, and as such, use what we would consider a very dated method of establishing communications. We are used to wired links or wireless access allowances, like what you're all using with Zero right now. The communications lines between…" X drifted, then realized that Blues had already used the term. "The means of communication between an android like myself and a Robot Master like Blues or Rock work in a very different fashion. It's something that no one uses anymore, that no one in today's world would be able to replicate," and that said nothing for the serial numbers they'd provided. The chances of randomly coming upon that information when making false duplicates to trick X?

It wasn't even remotely plausible.

"Next question?" Blues wasn't able to keep an edge of impatience from his voice. He had other things he wanted to be doing, not sitting and holding this base's hand while they contended with reality. He needed to look after Rock, needed to begin working on memory recovery. And if the memories couldn't be recovered, he needed to begin giving Rock some direction before he did begin 'examining' the network, which Blues would bet the Reploids wouldn't appreciate.

At least the encryption set surrounding Rock was keeping him nicely occupied.

Zero tilted his head in confusion for a moment as he read the next file in his queue. "Cerveau, why didn't you just ask yourself?"

Cerveau shook his head in a way that clearly meant that, without his visor, he'd be rolling his eyes. "Master X, would you please clarify what a 'Robot Master' is?"

Were it not for the ways that the sound could have been misinterpreted, X would have whistled appreciatively at the scope of the explanation. "It's a complex answer that would probably, in full, take a few hours to explain. On a very basic level, however, a Robot Master is the designation used for robot models built before the development of androids. Their…core programming sets are quite different from our own, in that they may look like an android or Reploid on the outside, but whereas we do our best to seamlessly blend in with human society, they sway more towards the machine aspect of their nature. Blues," he asked, "would you or Rock like to explain this?"

Rock's brow furrowed: he could explain what a Robot Master was quite easily, but he wasn't familiar enough with what, exactly, an android (Reploid?) was to really contrast them. Blues ran a hand along Rock's back as a reassurance: he'd get Rock up to speed as soon as these Reploid were satisfied enough to leave them be. "A Robot Master is…a unit developed to oversee and derive strategy sets for use by robots, or mechaniloids as you call them. We were developed to be independent, sapient units that would direct and guide lesser units. Different Robot Masters were developed for different areas of application, most of which were industrial. Most units were developed with human interface in mind, but that was never…the focus of the project." Many Robot Masters didn't look that human because that hadn't been the point. Blues himself was a 'human interface' unit, along with Rock and Roll, and had he stayed with Doctor Light like a good little robot, he'd have directed the twins in the lab and dealt with human visitors while Doctor Light was busy. Among other things.

"Human interface?" Cerveau asked.

Blues undid one of his gloves and held his hand up: it looked human. "A human interface unit was designed to interact with humans. My function wasn't to…run a power plant or a water purification plant. It wasn't to oversee construction zones or conservation efforts. My design reflects that. As does Rock's; he was also originally intended to be human interface in addition to lab support. There were others that…did not resemble humans so closely in design." Blues said that with a bit of a shrug; how 'human' they appeared had nothing to do with the unit's merit. It had everything to do with how well they could do their jobs. "I believe it was done to make the humans we spoke with more comfortable around us. Some of the larger Robot Masters were perceived as being intimidating."

Zero looked to X during the exchange, his eyes expressing a degree of confusion.

"What is it?" X asked once Blues had fallen silent.

"I've got the question messages queued up, but I'm reading them as they come in. I just got…about thirty directed at Master Blues. Should I prioritize because they were in response to Cerveau's question?"

X looked to his brothers, then back to Zero. "Yes," he said. "Let's get the questions addressed now so we're not doubling back later on."

Zero nodded. "Um…"he said, flipping through the messages. "Actually, I have this one three times in three different formats, so…" He deleted all three before looking to Blues. "Master Blues, you said that Robot Masters were responsible for making strategy sets for other robots. Is that why your work over the past week with the mechaniloids has been so evident?"

"Yes. The…mechaniloid coding used in an incredibly…watered-down interpretation of X's programming, which is…inefficient doesn't even _being_ to cover what that is. I formatted the mechaniloid units that I worked on over to a coding set that is more suited to their intended function, as well as finished writing the coding that the original programmers couldn't figure out." In all honesty, he'd changed their programming language entirely, which wasn't easy to learn on the go. That was partly why he held Rocinolle with some degree of esteem: rather than complain about having to learn a new programming language, she buckled down and learned what she needed to.

Zero began filing through the questions again, picking another out. "You mentioned human interface units were designed to work with humans. In what capacity?"

"In _all_ capacities. Ideally, any interaction with humans would be handled by a unit designed for human interface. Humans called individuals in their companies that had a similar job 'public relations representatives'."

"So talking to humans, relaying data to them or receiving new orders, any kind of communication or interaction is what a human interface unit is delegated with," Rock added since Blues was being vague again. Rock had snatched the glove from Blues' lap soon after he set it there and had pulled it over his own hand, flexing his fingers curiously. The glove was far too large for Rock's hand and even though he'd pulled it as far over his hand as it would go, his fingers still couldn't quite reach the tips inside.

X smiled at Rock's motions, noting to himself that he'd have to see if he could get someone in the base to make a set of gloves for the younger Robot Master.

"Not all of the mechaniloid programming sets were developed off of Master X. There were cases where older-model mechaniloids were found and studied. That in mind, are you using applicable coding developed by amending the codes developed from Master X's data, or is the coding you're using derived from your mechaniloids?"

"Derived from mine. His coding isn't ideal for use with mechaniloids."

"You mentioned industrial application. That sounds like they were foremen for construction crews."

Blues was silent for a moment. "There were Robot Masters that oversaw construction of varying edifice types, but that is not what the term 'industrial' is restricted to. Say, for example, an automated plant that creates steel. There are robots—mechaniloids," Blues amended—"that carry out the small tasks that result in that steel being made. However, when something unexpected happens in the plant, something the mechaniloids aren't programmed to contend with, they call for the Robot Master in charge of them to come, see the problem, fix the problem, and edit their programming to contend with the issue in all future instances."

"In essence, providing system updates for the units under your command?" X asked. "Sorry," he said, only a half-second later. "I didn't mean to cut ahead of your question queue, Zero."

"Precisely," Blues nodded. "All units that the issue pertained to would be updated immediately and, in addition, all other Robot Masters on that unit's network would be posted with the issue and prescribed update for use with their units, if applicable."

"I believe there's a generational gap, if you will, between the Robot Master and Reploid association with mechaniloids. We oversee their operations much the same as a human manager oversees their employees' work. Your relationship with them is different, though, from the way you speak of them as lesser units. Or perhaps I'm just misunderstanding your use of lesser unit." Zero's eyebrows furrowed. "Actually, I was wondering the same thing."

Rock and Blues exchanged a glance, as though unsure how to go about explaining that. At least, explaining it in words the Resistance would understand. "There are…several terms that Robot Masters interpret differently from humans. Lesser unit is…they are somewhat like pets to us. At the time, mechaniloids were designed to be subservient helper units, support units that worked under our direction. While the helper units were sometimes…borrowed, if the two Master units were close enough, they were _not_ shared. The units never had two Masters at once." That was _not_ permitted or tolerated by any Robot Master. "But, as pets, they were looked after by us and cared for by us."

Zero was silent for a moment, tagging the messages as he organized them, quickly finding and deleting all of the redundant queries. "You mentioned to Guardian Phantom earlier," he said, picking another message out of the pile, "that you heard what he had to say through the Garm unit that was recording the exchange. Is that an extension of the Robot Master and mechaniloid relationship that you can connect with them without establishing a link over the base's networks?"

"Yes, the base's network is not required to establish a connection with other units," Rock included, though as far as Blues could tell, the Reploids couldn't link that way with him. If he recalled from Rock's rambling about X while he was being built, X did originally have a feature that would let him 'telephone' his siblings, but not link fully the way Robot Masters could.

When the matter of communications had been brought up, Zero's systems had automatically highlighted a message that had been deemed relevant, and he opened it. "If you don't require the network to connect and haven't logged on, how is it that you claim the ability to revoke access to a unit? Only those with administrative-level clearance, such as Master X, can do that."

Blues' gaze turned to Menart and, even though he didn't make a move, his glare was very, very apparent. On the network, Blues reassigned the broadcast to Zero's signal. In an instant, Menart's access was revoked and he was unceremoniously evicted from the network. "Hand the array to Zero. He will handle the broadcast from here on out."

Rock paused in his lengthy examination of the glove to frown cutely up to the older unit and said in a soft voice, "Blues, that was mean."

While the eviction from the network _had _been a shock, Menart established a new connection and input his access code. When his peripheral displayed—in glaring boldface red letters, no less—an access denied message, he stared at Blues for a moment. The youngster tried to come up with a witty retort, opting instead to move over to Zero and set up the array.

Phantom's eyes widened perceptibly as Menart handed the dish to Zero, helping the blonde by plugging in the dish as Zero pulled his hair out of the way. For a unit to be on the net, yet unseen, untraceable, and have claimed administrative control over a network that would permit access revocation rights…

"Blues-dono datta?"

Zero winced, his proximity to Phantom not only affecting him because of the volume of the shout, but doubly so when it resonated across his freshly-established link with the array. "What was Master Blues?" he asked as he moved to the next examination table over, positioning the dish before jumping onto the tabletop.

"The night Neo Arcadia went down, the night I heard my father talking to someone on the network. I had thought that it was you, Master Zero, because the voice that I heard was referring to administrative rights," as he pointed to Menart, "but for him to have been booted from the net so effectively after admitting that he couldn't sense Blues-dono on the network…it was the same as what had happened to me." He looked to Blues. "How did you even establish a connection outside of the lab? The techs said that you didn't have the capabilities…" and that said nothing of the bloodshed that had occurred that night.

Until X said something about it. "Wait a minute. I realized then that Blues was responsible for the power outage and had been rerouting some of the troops, but what about the patrol units gunning down civilians? That wasn't your doing?" X knew what the First Law would have had to say about that kind of directive being issued.

Phantom didn't give Blues time to answer. "Forgive me for cutting you off, Blues-dono," he said, turning to X, "but from what little we were able to piece together, it was issues with the programming code. As I mentioned before, I have copies of the data. If Blues-dono would be willing to review them, as he seems the most adept of the Resistance members when it comes to coding…"

Phantom rambling without leaving an opening for Blues, who the questions were actually directed at, to answer was really losing the young Guardian any and all points of esteem he gained with the earlier display. Blues' voice was immensely irritated when he did cut Phantom off to answer X. "I did not direct any of the units to fire on citizens. I did not tamper with _those_ orders at all. I told you earlier, X, that my _only_ objective was to safely extract Rock from Neo Arcadia. I was only…cutting a path through." Blues considered answering Phantom's other questions, the ones about how he got onto the network, but instead, tilted his head toward Zero. "Next question?"

Zero nodded, surprised to see a few of the messages had follow-ups to ignore the questions. Apparently, he mused, they'd gotten their answers during the last little exchange. "Okay, um…it looks like I'm back on the original queue now." He frowned. "I think I can get away with asking these two as one question." Scanning over the messages again, he shrugged. "Master X, you mentioned that you and your brother were maintaining the lie about his true history as a means of protecting him. What were you protecting him, and I would assume Master Rock by extension, from? And had Guardian Phantom not provided us with certain bits of information, how long would you and Master Blues have kept the farce going?" Zero winced as he finished reading off the second message, hoping he hadn't offended either unit by not bothering to rephrase the question.

Rock knew that he'd have to be the one to answer. He felt in Blues' aura the moment he shut down to this line of questioning and knew that, really, this had to be grating on every last shred of Blues' patience with this interrogation. "Blues…has always been secretive. It would have been up to X or me to tell everyone about us being Robot Masters." Because Blues did not have any problem whatsoever with not correcting peoples' false viewpoints, not when it was beneficial for them to continue thinking that way. Rock knew that had staying here become too invasive to Blues, he would have packed Rock up and moved on. That Blues was tolerating _this_ spoke volumes of how he felt about X. It made Rock wonder if the android could even begin to understand what kind of gesture this was when it was coming from Blues.

X nodded. "On my end of things, I was at least aware of how old my brother is. Although I only recently discovered that he's been active for all of a week, rather than my original assumption of before I was sealed, it's still a massive shift from the world from back then and the world we know now. It's standard for all new arrivals," although Zero somehow hadn't been granted that reprieve, "to be given a couple of weeks to adjust. With Neo Arcadia putting such a chokehold on Reploid character and personality development, most of you know what it feels like to leave the city, to leave a place where all you are is a number that can be retired for saying hello to a human to being treated _like_ a human, being treated how we are supposed to be. I know more than a few of you who have taken to refusing to answer to anything other than your identification number even after Ciel provided you with a name." He smiled at Rock. "Take into consideration what each of you remember of your first days here, and then add on the fact that it's been centuries since the last time you were active. I'm sure that everyone on this base can understand why a cover was needed. And yes, for anyone that's concerned, I would have made a point of having this little session after a few weeks anyway." Whether or not Blues approved.

He had honestly been surprised when it was Rock that had answered, his halo locking on muted red as he scanned both his brothers quickly. While Rock's systems were still showing green, the yellow-that-was-Blues'-green had started teetering closer to red on a few points. He'd have to keep a careful eye on his brother, especially when the scan shot back an efficiency percentage score. The fact that it was so low only verified X's concerns. If this got too out of hand, he'd excuse Blues and Rock from further questioning. "Next question?"

Ciel tapped Milan's shoulder, leaning over and whispering something into his ear.

A moment later, a new connection request popped up in Zero's systems, the verification coming with a message on its heels. He looked to Ciel for a moment, then smiled, thankful that she'd found a way to follow protocol with the forum. "This is backtracking a bit, but Reploid-human relations, on a professional level anyway, exist as a codependency, as a symbiotic relationship. Perhaps it is just being raised in a world where this is the norm that necessitates this question, but for the Robot Masters to have had members of their race appear intimidating or inhuman in their forms seems either counterintuitive or as an indication that there was a more pronounced delineation between human and machine back then. Is there a reason that human interface design was not a priority?"

A shock went through Rock's systems as his eyes widened and his face paled, through he didn't look up at Blues, or X, or anyone in the room. He became very still, shocked to the core that someone had actually _asked_ that.

Blues' posture became rigid and, even though he barely turned his head, his gaze landed on Ciel. There was not even the most remote inkling of amusement or approval in his expression. This? Was not funny. This was _not_ something he needed to hear, must less _tolerate_.

Ciel immediately lowered her gaze to the floor, feeling like she had stepped across some invisible boundary line between her and the rest of the Resistance in asking a question that resulted in such tense silence.

Alouette, seeing her sister so upset, cuddled up to her before making a childish upset face at Blues. Leaning closer to Ciel, she offered her stuffed animal to the human for her to hug. She hoped the little plush creature would help Ciel feel a little bit better. The mean older robot not making angry faces at her from behind those scary glasses would have helped, too, but she didn't want to get glared at like that.

Ciel mutely accepted the doll, wrapping one arm around Alouette as coddled the doll and the young Reploid.

X looked to Ciel, momentarily upset that his scanning capabilities were not set up for human reading the way Cerveau's were, and moved his gaze back to the Robot Masters. Rock was showing low levels of stress at the question, a response that X couldn't quite place as to why, but Blues? The eldest of the Light children was edging all the closer towards not even yellow anymore. "I think, for now, it's best if we avoid that topic. We'll have time to address that at a later date," he hoped, "and I hope you don't mind us skipping that for now."

Ciel didn't even look up as she shook her head.

"Comm's quiet, too," Zero noted. "I've had redactions on all the questions aimed at Master Blues save one."

A change of topic would be useful. "Go ahead and read it."

Zero shook his head. "This one is in the same vein. I'd rather not…"

Rock still wasn't looking up at Blues, but his head was tilted toward him and he'd relaxed against Blues' side again, even if Blues didn't relax at all. They were communicating rapidly, Rock trying to placate Blues' anger, that old pain, that gaping wound that so many had gouged out from his heart. Rock wanted to help Blues heal, but if living meant that it'd constantly be rubbed at…all Rock could do was try to reassure him. Even if Blues' data sets were trumping all of his counterarguments.

Zero looked at X's brothers, saw the way they'd tensed up, the way that their body language was just screaming the need to change the topic, and he turned to X. "X, get on the net so I can show you this, but I refuse to read this one off. I'm not about to make whatever Ciel's question did any worse with this one."

X shook his head. "I'll defer to your judgment on this one. Besides," and there was sadness in his voice, "their scans are coming back with a lot of emotional stressors. At this point, it may be better to let them head back downstairs and settle down. Especially so for Rock. He's barely been active a quarter of a day right now. I'd like to avoid overdoing anything with him, and this is setting off a lot of alarms with my scan modes." He hoped he hadn't said too much.

Blues' mouth became a thin line, but other than that, he did not respond to X's words. He was occupied with trying to convince Rock that, really, he was alright (it wasn't working) and bringing his own stress levels down without having to activate any displays. The last thing he needed was to start _trembling_ or something.

Rock put on the cutest face he could muster and chanced a look around the room before snuggling back into Blues' side. He knew that X was more alarmed by Blues' status than his own at the moment, but this was…a lot to take in with a staggering majority of his memories returning with error messages. He couldn't even be sure he had visual data for each of his own siblings. He didn't even remember his creator. Blues had to tell him the name. Rock had zero access to any memories of Doctor Light. None whatsoever. Blues' reassurances were accepted by his systems, at least about Rock's situation with memory files, but the child made a point of rejecting any and all reassurances that Blues was okay. Because even for Blues, this status was not okay.

Alright, fine, Blues' aura said. Rock shifted and got to his feet so that Blues could do the same. "I am going to take him downstairs," where it was quiet and people wouldn't be prying. "This is enough questioning." More than enough. They'd have _plenty_ to gossip about now. Rock caught Blues' hand and the two Robot Masters turned and left the rom. Not even Rock looked back.

X sighed, closed his eyes for a moment, and shook his head. "Just to let those of you not in the med lab know, my brothers have stepped out and all further questions directed at them will be logged with Zero and brought up at a much later date if and when either of my siblings feel up to the task of answering. From here on out, I would kindly request that the questions you're fielding through Zero to be aimed elsewhere. And there had better be questions, because if I'm about to find out that all you've done in the last few hours is gossip about my family, I'm going to be highly upset and have Blues start revoking access to anybody throwing wild theories across the network." Standing, X moved to sit on the table where Phantom was, nuzzling close to his youngest son. "Zero?"

"A lot of people disconnected from private link with me after Ciel's question," he explained. "I'm sending requests out to everyone still on the net that I'm not linked to." A moment passed in silence. "Y'know," he said, looking around the room, "the six of you don't necessarily need to link. I mean…you're here."

"Protocol," X noted. "You're scanning all the questions as they come in. Even the people in here have to wait until their questions are queued."

"I know that," Zero replied, "but I made Cerveau voice his question." It hit him then what X had meant. "Oh, wait a minute, okay. Just don't send the question. Permission requests will be enough." As the messages started coming in, Zero was quick to tag and categorize them, reading off the first one. "With Guardian Phantom's recent defection, what are our plans in handling him and verifying the authenticity of his efforts?"

"Phantom will be staying here, but I will be placing him under supervision. As much as I trust him because he's my son, you are all aware that we have protocols in place to deal with the capture and retention of high-level Neo Arcadian agents, even if we never had plans to go after any of those individuals. Cerveau wants him retained in a charging pod until his charge levels have normalized. I'll station him with Zero, as long as there are no complaints."

"I think this next one is aimed at Phantom. How did you not realize that Copy X wasn't your father?"

"Okay, wait a minute," X said, looking at Zero. "Who asked that? Honestly, not a single person here knew that Copy X wasn't me until they came here and met me." There was a severe logic failure in that question.

"Original source responded with 'Most of us didn't have face-to-face contact with Copy X. It's a different story from Guardian Phantom's perspective'. Perhaps Phantom should answer?" Zero looked to the Guardian, then back to X. "Just a thought."

X shrugged, then motioned for his son to answer.

"Whoever built the copy was very skilled. Everything about my father had been duplicated. Voice patterns, access codes, facial features. Even on the network, he felt like my father. He really was a carbon copy. The only difference was the red eyes, but like I said before, Fefnir's taken to changing his eye color's coding when the mood strikes him. We didn't think much of it, still haven't as far as I am aware when it comes to my siblings."

Zero nodded. "I think I'm going to prioritize the ones for Phantom right now, since I seem to have a few more of those." He fell silent again. "Oh, wait, here's one." He stopped, looking around the room. "No one takes offense to me picking and choosing out of the queue when the question interests me, do they?"

The comm was silent.

"Alright," Zero said with a shrug. "Is anyone else in Neo Arcadia aware of our location coordinates?"

Phantom shook his head. "No. Copy X and the Judges never asked because I wanted the mission classified and held in the strictest confidence. I did, however, provide false coordinates to one of my lieutenants before I left on the off chance that someone would ask for the data. The Trans Server I obtained the coordinates from was wiped a short time after I had gotten the information, and no amount of data retrieval proved effective in restoring it. It was as if the jump had never been made."

"Where do the false coordinates direct them to?"

"They lead to a facility I found via satellite feeds in the desert far to the west of Neo Arcadia," since the true Resistance base was located to the east of the city. "It's much further from the city than this location and quite a ways north." Now, of course, he was worried that there was more than one active base.

X couldn't help but laugh. "I wonder how Fefnir is going to take it if someone asks and they realize that the Resistance base coordinates are right in the middle of Anubis Necromancess' territory." As much as Fefnir valued the skills and abilities of his troops, that would be a low blow that he wouldn't react to kindly. "Zero, next question?"

"Bouncing this back to Cerveau. He's next on the queue."

Cerveau nodded. "Guardian Phantom, do you have any intention of retrieving your siblings now that you realize that your father is here?"

"If a means of doing so can be figured out, I'd be up for it. At present, though, I'd have no idea how." Phantom shook his head. "Each of us was built with a separate skillset based off of Father's own abilities and specifications. I was meant as a stealth unit, Harpy for aerial combat, Levi for aquatic, and Fef for ground efforts. While being a stealth unit does present some advantages, I'm horribly outmatched when pitted against any of them in direct combat for an extended period of time." Quick strikes from the shadows and crippling strikes to limbs really were the only way to bring down a unit with his personal array of skills, and that was no small feat when dealing with a machine that was just as well-built as he was. "I would like to, and I'd be more than willing to listen should anyone have an idea, but at present, I don't know how."

Zero waited before reading the next message. "Milan, was that question from you or Ciel?"

"That was me," Milan replied, pulling a bit away from Ciel, though Alouette continued to cuddle up to the human. "I heard Phantom's discussion with you earlier, Master X, and I was wondering the implications behind serving as a double agent according to the city. As far as I'm aware, that requires that you make contact with the city when you can to pass along information. Do you plan to fulfill that?"

"If I have the permission of the Resistance, I would like to work with whomever you have as your intelligence officers to forge the reports. I need something reasonable and preferably littered with a little bit of the truth, but I'd prefer to keep them as in the dark as possible. And as misdirected."

"But that requires you be in the city, or at least within range that a signal can get through the Eden Dome."

Phantom nodded. "I explained as much before the Judges and told them that my reports would be few and far between. What they know is that I will try to earn the favor of the Resistance and start working with you on the raids of the city. What they don't realize is that if we do go into the city and I am allowed to come with," though that was a very slim likelihood, "I will be stealing what I can and lying to my units to keep them far away from me. Since I can cloak my signal on the net at will, and that's even if I'm online at all, they'll be hard-pressed to figure out where my signal is actually coming from."

Phantom looked to X. "I'm fairly certain you remember the week-long games of hide-and-seek we played after all four of us had been activated."

X simply rolled his eyes in response.

"You mentioned that the entire city went down," Zero asked, "but that would have required unilateral control over an array of networks. How would it be possible for Master Blues to have taken down the entire city so efficiently?"

Phantom actually curled up a bit at that, eyes darting towards the ground. "Father is going to have a field day trying to fix that," the Guardian answered. "I'm guessing that whoever asked that question was recovered by the Resistance at least thirty-one months ago, if not before, since that would mean they wouldn't have been around when Copy X ordered the entire city reconfigured to one main network system. The servers are still housed in separate facilities, but the network is a giant amalgam system now. The only limitations on access are coding levels, so citizens can't access the military files, but most of the military has full-rights access and permissions. It's…" Phantom stopped, shaking his head. "The net's a horrible mess most of the time because of the security measures that had to be implemented."

"Okay, next one is more of a comment than a question, but Hirondelle said he'll work with you to set up the reports, once the rest of the base is okay with you." Zero smirked. "And the next question is asking if you'd be willing to provide covert entrance and extraction points from the city."

Phantom snorted a bit. "I know at least three hundred ways in and out of the city that would be off every grid and sensor." He had been their head reconnaissance and information officer for a reason.

Zero nodded, then stopped and glared at Canard. "No. Just no. I refuse to read that. And you really need to check the attitude."

"I have every right to ask what I did," Canard countered.

"No!" Zero said. "Unless you rephrase the question, I'm not doing that to Phantom. We've already had enough people upset because of the questions that got flung around, and I'm thankful Master Blues didn't glare me to death for relaying Ciel's." He turned to the huddle of ashamed human sitting nearby. "No offense, Lady Ciel."

"None taken," she whispered.

"What did he ask?" X said.

Zero tossed another glare at Canard. "He wants to know how we are so sure of Phantom's intentions that we're talking this openly about things with him in earshot."

"What I asked was how are we so sure that he's not really playing us for fools and really does intend to stab us all in the back and turn us over to the city for retirement," Canard snapped.

And a moment later, Zero felt Canard's connection link sever from him. "What the…?"

"Dammit!" Canard snapped. "It was a legitimate question and _I_ get booted off the net?" The Reploid huffed. "I'm going to my dorm," he said as he left the room.

"What the heck just…" Zero smirked. "Never mind I asked."

"Let's keep going," X said. "Next question?"

* * *

><p>"It <em>was<em> a legitimate question," Blues pointed out. Both of them were listening intently to the discussion, settled on the sequestered portion of the network.

Rock shifted on the network, his encryption bubble crackling as his physical head turned to look at Blues, frowning slightly. "It was a mean question," he corrected as they got back to the room. The door slid shut behind Blues and Rock had to avoid looking back at it as it scrambled and locked.

He knew that Blues would catch on that Rock wanted to play with that _really badly _if he gave it the time of day.

Blues undid his scarf and folded it neatly, placing it on the foot of the bed on top of Rock's undersuit and his own trench. His sunglasses went by the terminal and his boots, the foot of the bed. He needed to defrag and badly, especially now that the cat was out of the bag.

He needed to be able to think clearly to deal with these Reploids.

Rock looked up when Blues flopped onto the bed, covering his eyes with one arm. The child walked over and tugged the remaining glove off Blues' free hand, claiming it as Rock's Newest Toy as he scooted up onto the bed. Rock didn't need to defrag, but he should probably begin working on his memory files.

In fact, yes, that _was_ his homework assignment, Blues' aura said.

"Are you going to defrag fully?" Rock asked, though his voice was doubtful, especially now that he saw the estimated time needed to do so. He couldn't imagine Blues willingly going into 'sleep' mode for that long, not in their current situation.

"No, I'll take…ten hours." That would need to be good enough, even though that still seemed like such a long time. Blues scanned Rock, checking his energy levels. "Plug in if you need to recharge." Blues wouldn't mind the company.

Rock nodded and even though Blues couldn't see the motion, he could feel it over their link. The child settled with his back against the wall, sitting with his legs over one of Blues'. He pulled the second glove over his other hand, pondering it. He felt Blues back off of the network, felt him cut back a lot of what he was monitoring, backing off of the discussion still going on in that lab, loosening his iron grip on the network so he could delegate more of his attention to the task at hand. Blues' attention to Rock didn't falter or weaken, however, and it was reassuring to know that if anything happened, Blues would be _right there_ and someone would be _very sorry_ for forcing him to wake by upsetting Rock.

Rock didn't intend to let that happen. Blues really, really, _really_ needed to defrag. He was far overdue. He'd have said good-night when Blues finally sank down into a meditative state, but he didn't remember being taught that that was the custom, so instead, Rock sat in silence, listening to the hum of their minds on the network as he delved into his memory banks, choosing a promising file to try to clean up and restore.

* * *

><p>"No," X said in response to the question Zero had asked. "I have no intentions of letting anyone in Neo Arcadia know that I'm still alive until we retake the city. And Phantom won't be releasing that information either. Had that been the case, I would have extracted my kids a long time ago."<p>

"Even though it'll end up pitting you against your own family?"

X shrugged. "We'll find a way to correct that problem before the final attack," X said. "Can we please divert to something other than the idea Phantom and I are currently on the other side of a war our family is involved in?"

Zero deleted a number of messages and let their senders know. "Okay, looks like we're down to two. First one up is…" Zero frowned. "What is it with the Resistance members and the rude questions tonight? Are they purposefully trying to get locked off the net for the night?"

"What now?" Phantom asked.

"I'm just going to read this verbatim. I'm done trying to keep things clean when people are obviously not trying to be tactful," and he sighed as the sender provided a new version of the message. "I understand that this may sound disrespectful, Master X, and I will apologize in…" '_Thanks for the edit,_' Zero sent across the link. "And I will apologize in advance if this comes out in a way that upsets anyone, but you said to Master Blues that family was more important to you right now. Doesn't that seem a little selfish, especially with the situation in Neo Arcadia being what it is? You're technically putting family ahead of the remnants of two races."

X shook his head. "First off, that wasn't what I meant. I still fully intend to handle the Neo Arcadian issue, but that will be in due time. As it stands," and X looked over to the huddle of chairs, "Ciel's research is still incomplete, so taking back the city may prove more devastating in the long run. Right now, I need to focus on my family. Getting Zero readjusted and helping him recover his memories, even if he does still prove highly capable in combat, is a priority. So is helping Blues and Rock adjust to life in the twenty-third century. They've, in essence, jumped through time from their world to ours with no interim to explain the massive paradigm shift that's occurred. Now that Phantom's with us, and although I still intend to follow protocol, it's important to get him acquainted with everyone and see what we can do with the intel he can provide." X looked at Zero. "Does that answer your question?"

Zero nodded a moment later. "Alright, last question for the night unless someone wants to drop something on me."

When nothing was sent through the active links, Zero disconnected from everything except the broadcast dish and the unit that had sent the last message. "Master X, you said you have no intentions of reclaiming leadership of Neo Arcadia once the city is ours. Who will you be placing in command, then?"

X sighed heavily. "I…First off, I need to apologize for that. I'm incredibly tired and incredibly old in mind, so to be forced to shoulder the burden of leadership…I don't want to be elevated on some pedestal I don't see myself as deserving, and I am not keen on being seen as some all-powerful being that can save the city. Yes, I led the construction effort, and yes, I was the one that moved everyone into the city once the Eden Dome was complete, but to see what's happened in a hundred years and then just go back into old routines? I can't do that to myself. Even with the Judges, I can't sit there and let my word be law. It's not fair to the people, and it's really not fair to me. When it comes to that matter, however, of figuratively passing the torch…" X really wished at that moment that he was solid enough to lean against someone. "I will probably assume control of the city at first, and I may retain the position should it prove easier for me now that I have a support network instead of a throng of mindlessly loyal followers," a pointed look was directed at Phantom at that, "but I will eventually either find someone to serve as my replacement or reinstate the democratic process that the city had and bow out of an electoral race."

How the city would be ruled depended heavily on the situation in the city whenever they were able to reclaim it.

"I suppose that's all for tonight?" Milan said.

"It should be. Take Ciel back to her room. There's still a few hours left before she needs to go to sleep, so if you feel like trying to get some more work done," X offered.

"I'll see what I can do," Ciel muttered. "I need more crystals, though. Arnue's running low on energy and I don't want to risk tapping his core crystal during the tests."

"I have some you can use for your research, Lady Ciel," Cerveau offered, already opening the drawer he kept them stored in. He pulled out a small container and handed it to Ciel before turning to ponder Phantom. "Guardian Phantom, before you settle in for a recharge cycle, would you mind removing your bracers and vest as well? It'd be best if a full maintenance round was done on your armor." Everyone in the base had a lot to ponder now, especially since Master X spoke so openly, and Cerveau thought it'd be best if everyone was given a chance to calm down and cool off, then sleep on this new information.

Phantom nodded, pressing the release triggers on his armor, handing the items to Cerveau once it had disengaged. "I heard you mention me being placed under Master Zero's supervision," he said to X.

X looked over at Zero, who was busy disconnecting from the array. "We need someone to keep an eye on you for the first few days, ensure that you're not presenting a risk to the Resistance or actually trying to double-cross us. It's more to assuage others than anything, since I personally believe…" He stopped as Ciel, Milan, and Alouette headed for the lab door. "Don't push yourself too hard, Ciel," he called out. "And don't keep beating yourself up about the question. You didn't know what a touchy subject that would prove to be, and I'm not faulting you for asking that," even if Blues and Rock hadn't taken kindly to it.

Ciel nodded as she was escorted out of the room, Alouette holding one of her hands as Milan wrapped an arm over her shoulders.

"You were saying?" Phantom said with a smile.

"Sorry," X said. "I personally believe that the security precautions are kind of moot considering _why_ you're here, but I'm still going to follow regs and make sure that it's okay for you to be walking around like the rest of us. I have no intentions of treating you like a prisoner for the full duration of your stay here." He motioned to one of the security team. "That does, however, require that you be in restraints when you're moving around the base."

Phantom hopped down from the exam table, offering his arms to Moineau as the Reploid approached, and he nodded softly as the cuffs were locked around his arms once more.

"Zero, escort Phantom to your quarters and plug him into the charger pod. I need to make a few stops around the base, so I'll be down there shortly." There were a lot of things he wanted to discuss with his son out of earshot of the base.

"Alright," Zero answered as he moved for the back part of Cerveau's lab, returning a moment later with a large sheet that he threw over Phantom's shoulders. "I'm fairly you don't want to be walking around in just your pelvic armor," Zero said. "Let's get you downstairs and settled in for the night. Cerveau, I'll be back up tomorrow morning for Phantom's armor. Would oh-seven-hundred be too early?"

Cerveau took a moment to consider the time, then shook his head. "No, that'll work out well. I'll have it ready by then."

Zero wrapped an arm around Phantom and led him out of the room toward the lift.

"Thank you for the use of your lab, Cerveau," X said. "How much longer will the programmers be in hibernation?"

Cerveau turned to their charger pods, considering them. "At least…oh-nine-hundred hours to ensure a full charge and auto-repair cycle on them, though I'll need to check them over after they're up. Actually…I should just give them nanite injections now, when they're not awake and being squeamish about it."

"See to it that they're given uniforms as soon as they're active again. And get someone from security to pick out rooms for them." He'd have to bother Ciel tomorrow for name assignments anyway, and that would likely take a while if she was still focused on how his brothers had responded to her question. He really hoped she would be feeling better by the following morning. X turned from the medic, calling over his shoulder, "I'll see you tomorrow, Cerveau. Don't stay up too late working on the armor. If it comes down to it, I'll get Phantom a uniform in the interim."

* * *

><p>Translations:<p>

_Aisumimasen_: Forgive me, said incredibly formally.

_Tatte yo_: Get up (stand up).

_Blues-dono datta?_: (That) was Master Blues?


	16. Exploring the New World

_Now that things have settled down a bit around the Resistance base, Phantom gets tucked in for the night and asked to recount the tales of legends, Rock gets to meet a few people before the base settles down to sleep, and we discover that Rock isn't as defenseless as his memory status would make it seem._

* * *

><p>Blues wasn't actually sleeping. He laid still, one arm still covering his eyes as though to keep the light out, but his mind was very, very active as he defragmented each of his processors. Or, at least, got a start on it. His systems were a bit warmer than the norm, but he wasn't overheating and, overall, he thought that his discomfort level should be low enough that he'd be able to appropriately plan their next course of action.<p>

He also noted that the second he dropped into a meditative state, Rock began to go at the door lock with vigor. Blues would have smirked if any of that was still online. It'd been a bit of a lure, though Rock was tearing through it faster than Blues anticipated. He didn't think anyone in the base would be able to harm Rock, not without coming into harm's way themselves—the child was more than capable of asserting himself—but he thought that perhaps it may be better to have a…second set of hands to look after him.

It was fortunate that he could still get a signal, even here. Of course, he was routing through all kinds of networking within the base and the satellite feed outside the base to secure it, but it was strong enough to send the single command he needed to.

-_Initiate activation sequence: Pod DWN-024_.-

Insurance. It never hurt to have insurance.

* * *

><p>Phantom had kept his eyes turned toward the floor the entire trip, barely looking up to ensure where he was going as Zero continued to lead him through the base. He hadn't even realized that they'd reached their destination until Zero stopped suddenly. "Master Zero?"<p>

"My room," he said, the door opening to reveal the nearly-empty space beyond. "I'll get you plugged into the charger, though I'm a little interested in hearing this story that X says he used to tell you."

"I can stay awake if you'd like," Phantom assured as Zero pulled him into the room. "And the sheet wasn't really that necessary."

"Still, you've been stripped down to base armor and your undersuit. I was just trying to be considerate."

Phantom blushed slightly, his cheeks tinting a faint shade of pink. "Thank you very much, Master Zero. I meant no insult."

"None taken," Zero said, pulling the cloth from Phantom's shoulders. "I really wish they'd be okay with giving me the fob so I could take the cuffs off while you're here, but I'll guess this'll have to do until everyone's okay with you being here."

The Guardian smiled softy. "It's fine, Master Zero. If this is what it takes for those that follow my father to trust me, then it is something I am willing to do. This is a sacrifice," he said, lifting his restrained arms, "that I make without complaint."

"I still think it's inconsiderate, even though that's coming from someone that's only gotten a second-hand account of what's going on in the city. Being woken up a century out of my time is a little disorienting, and it doesn't help that what memories I'm supposed to have are scattered and incomplete."

"What of your past have you remembered?"

Zero helped Phantom into the pod, brushing the ends of a few strands of hair out of the way as he plugged the Reploid into the charger. "Just a few things here and there. First one I got was the memory of getting a cake for your father when he finally passed his Class SA ranking test. Few more of just loitering around my quarters back at the Maverick Hunter base. Some snippets from what I figure to be the Elf Wars because what I can see of my body doesn't match the ones from the older memory files I've been able to restore, looks like this one."

"Father mentioned that you were shunted from your original body before the Wars started."

"I've been trying to figure out the why for a while now. X ever tell you why?"

Phantom's eyes fell a bit. "You…you provided your original body for study. You were one of three immune units to the Virus that started the Maverick Wars, and…" He drifted slightly, looking away.

"And what?" Zero was honestly curious.

There was something to embellishing the truth, Phantom realized. "You had the strongest immunity of the three, so you offered yourself for study. To prevent any accidental damage, you were provided a secondary body to use in the interim."

"They never finished studying me, did they?"

Phantom shook his head. "No, they did. A long while ago. It's how they developed the cure for the Maverick Virus and ended that war. The Elf Wars stem from one of the scientists that used the cure to serve his own needs by augmenting it and corrupting the source. By turning the Cyber Elves that had been developed into insane controllers of their Reploid hosts," their parents, "and turning family and friend against each other."

Zero's countenance had darkened at that revelation, as if something had restored but he couldn't isolate the file.

"Perhaps you'd like for me to tell you the story Father used to tell us when we'd be going to bed," Phantom suggested.

Zero smiled, grabbing the sheet from where he'd thrown it over the desk, moving to the pod and covering Phantom, carefully tucking the fabric around the Reploid's body. "Even though you're the one going to sleep," he said, smiling.

"You should be as well, Master Zero," Phantom said, "but yes, even though I'm the one going to sleep. And younger."

"Only because you know that I'm older. I certain don't feel it."

Phantom snickered. "I'm sure you will when the memories all come back." That he'd been able to hide his melancholy at the thought of Zero remembering so little of the life he'd had was something he was thankful for. He did not want to be the one explaining to Zero why it was so important for him to reclaim his past.

The Guardian was sure it would help lift his father's spirits as well.

"So," Zero said, pulling his helmet off and shaking his hair loose as he set the armor on the desk, "let's hear this epic tale of how awesome X and I were during the Elf Wars."

"What makes you think my father told me stories of his own heroism?"

"Honestly, as much as he tries to be the demure 'don't look at me' type, your father has an ego. You just have to figure out what to do to get him to show it."

Phantom was only slightly tempted to ask how Zero knew that. "Well, I don't want to bore you with the little details," though he and his siblings had not been bored in the months it had taken for X to tell the tale in full, "so maybe I should start with the final battle of the Elf Wars against the Great Destroyer?"

"X used a code name for Omega?" And not the one Omega had given himself?

Phantom shuddered a little at the thought that Zero remembered that hulking terror of the Elf Wars and had just idly tossed the name out as if it meant nothing. "Yes, Master Zero," he finally answered. "I am fairly certain my father did not approve of the name Omega had used for himself." None looked too kindly on any creature, man or machine, that dared to call themselves a god. Especially one so undeserving of the title as Omega had been. "The war had been going on for several years by this time, and several good people, human and Reploid alike, had fallen in the war that plagued the planet. The Maverick Hunters, although still united against the scourge of Weil and his Great Destroyer," Phantom said, a little annoyed when he realized that his arms being cuffed as they were kept him from being able to make the sweeping gestures X had when the stories had been told to them, "had banded together, the separate branches from around the world coming together in a final effort to stop the tides of devastation that had claimed the land. Among these sworn defenders were two of ancient lineage—the forefather of our race and the greatest warrior the world had ever known—that vowed upon their lives to stand until the last against the Great Destroyer. Armed with buster and blade, they stood as the testament of the strength of all that remained good and true in the world…"

* * *

><p>X yawned slightly, mostly out of habit, as he wandered the hallway of the sixth level, moving for Rock and Blues' room. He hoped they weren't sleeping. Seeing as he couldn't knock, and Blues wouldn't take kindly to either Zero or Phantom being that close to the room, he was going to have to set off the door chime.<p>

Reaching out, he let his energy brush against the sensor, listening to the soft sound of a bell coming from the other side of the door.

Rock looked up when the door chimed, blinking. Someone was visiting? Already? Rock glanced at Blues' prone form, but of course he didn't move. Rock reached for the door, feeling for the energy that set off the chime. Oh, it was X. The child considered for a moment, but asking Blues to get up to open the door wasn't really an option. And yes, while Rock didn't have the 'key' needed to open the door, he could pick its lock just fine. He almost had it open to begin with, so he redoubled his efforts to ensure he'd be able to get it open before the visitor on the other side misinterpreted _that_ action too.

He really didn't want X to start yelling again.

When the door did slide open for X, Blues wasn't on the other side. Both brothers were on the bed, Blues lying down with an arm over his eyes, completely motionless, and Rock was sitting closer to the foot of the bed, resting his back against the wall, his legs resting over Blues', looking at X curiously.

"Hey," X said, walking in. "I just wanted to check up on you and Blues to make sure you were doing okay." His voice remained low as he noticed the elder laying down on the bed. "He went to sleep?"

A flicker of confusion crossed Rock's features, and he didn't nod or shake his head. "He's defragmenting. He'll be…down for a while."

"That's good," X said. "Although…if he's busy with that, how did he open the door? Or was that you?"

"I did that." Rock smiled at that, as though something about the door lock excited him. "He didn't tell me to leave it alone, and it wasn't a very difficult sequence to get, so it only took twenty minutes to work out. Though now that I've broken it once, it'll scramble into something harder when it locks again." Lucky Rock!

X smiled at his brother's obvious excitement. "Considering that I couldn't even begin to chip at that lock, I'm incredibly impressed." Maybe it had something to do with the differences in their processors.

Blinking, X looked to Rock. "Wait a minute. You said that Blues was defragging. Wouldn't he just set that process to one system and transfer over to one of the other three?" As protective as Blues was, it was a shock that he was sleeping while Rock remained awake. "Or is he defragging all four?"

Rock looked down at Blues' prone form, then back up at X. "He's running maintenance on all of them." Because they all needed it. Blues didn't have four processors so he wouldn't have to go offline for maintenance: he _needed_ all four of them to fulfill his obligations. That and deal with the conflicts in his programming. Carefully, Rock slipped off the bed, trying not to jostle Blues too much. He sat down in the chair at the terminal and spun it around to face X. It was the same kind they'd been sitting on in Cerveau's lab and Rock had to scoot so far down he nearly fell off to have his feet reach the floor to stop the spinning.

X moved further into the room, dropping to one knee as he motioned Rock off of the chair. "If you need to lower it, there's a little lever here. Push the chair down when you press this." Moving back a step, he fell back into a cross-legged hover, waiting for Rock to settle himself back into the chair. "You know, I still feel like I'm missing something here. You say he's running maintenance, and I know that his core doesn't need to be charged so the pod would be a moot point, but you haven't actually agreed that he's sleeping. There's something I'm just not catching on about, isn't there?"

Rock settled into the chair again, smiling in satisfaction when he could sit in it normally, even if it'd be a bit too low for Blues now. He looked up at X again, frowning at the android's question, that confusion flitting across his features again. "I…don't understand why you call it _sleeping_."

"I call it that because that's what humans do, what we're programmed to emulate by going into hibernation. It basically lowers all operational functions to minimum levels, just above what would cause a full shutdown, and diverts most of our processor power to internal repairs, data management, and letting the nanites do their work without interference. We are, in essence, asleep like a human, though the hibernation isn't deep enough that we can't be woken out of it. I'd show you what I meant, but seeing as I'm not exactly set up the same way anymore, it's a bit difficult. I'd suggest maybe taking you to see some of the other Reploids here, but I'm not sure how Blues would take me having you out of the room," especially with Zero and Phantom down the hall.

"He'll come back online if I'm taken from the base or if…something upsetting happens," or if Rock called him. "We…he can hear us right now. He's talking to me via link, though not as actively as normal. He's turned a lot of his displays off so he can focus as much as he can on defragmenting and he backed off of the comm network almost entirely, but he…we don't go into hibernation for maintenance. He waited a really long time and pushed himself further than…further than he'd have preferred to, but when one of us defrags…it's like when humans meditate. We can still interact, still speak and execute tasks, but it's…kind of rude to interrupt. He'll be upset if he has to get up before he finishes. Anyone would be upset if they were interrupted. 'It better be good,' is what Elec would tell people." Rock kind of half-smiled at that memory, of one night where the power went out while Elec was running maintenance. Rock remembered snatches of a lab and remembered another unit disrupting Elec, but he couldn't remember who it was or where they were.

X nodded. "I really have been thinking about you two in the wrong mindset. Even knowing you're older than me doesn't keep me from seeing you as early-model androids, and that leads me to figuring that you work like I do…or did." The name Rock had referenced, however, had been completely over his head. "Although I'm curious to know why Blues didn't explain that to me sooner. It would have helped a bit to know that you don't actually sleep like we do," and it explained how he'd been able to get Rock back on his feet so quickly.

"Would you want to meet any of the others?" X asked, quickly changing the subject. "And I'll make sure they don't ask or say anything inappropriate. I really should have had someone help Zero field those questions," and Ciel _definitely_ hadn't helped the situation any.

Rock thought that Blues hadn't told X because Blues weighed the consequence of telling him versus not saying anything and came up that not saying anything was of more inherent value. Everything was an exchange, every decision costing something, and Blues was an excellent economist, even if it often made people upset with him. Rock nodded at X's question, his face brightening some, especially after the change of subject: at least X wasn't yelling at Blues, or even worse, waking him so he could yell at him. "I'd like that. I have the floor plans on file," courtesy of Blues, "but I haven't been anywhere aside from here and that lab." Although in Blues' defense, he'd only been active a few hours.

"Well, since you have the floor plans, is there anywhere you'd like to go? Or perhaps someone you'd like to meet? I know the floor plans aren't linked into the fob database, but I figured you or Blues might have looked into that at some point." It was odd, X realized, that he wasn't worried about these two units effectively breaking through every firewall and defense system on the networks.

Rock tilted his head, considering. Where to head to? There were a lot of people here that were really frustrated with Blues, and Rock didn't think he really wanted to talk to any of them. He'd been working on mechaniloids, so that might be a good place to visit, otherwise…those other two units that Blues had flagged were nearby, too. "Is it okay for me to meet people right now? A lot of them were…upset."

"It's more…it's more along the lines of worried or concerned for their safety than upset," X explained. "It's a major shock to most of the people here that I'm even capable of lying, letting alone maintaining a cover story. They all know that I don't take kindly to people who try to hide their true intentions, so for me to do that very thing is…well outside of what they know of me. They don't know everything about my past because it's not for them to know. It's not important, but that leaves them seeing me as this perfect being when I'm not." When, in some cases, he was more flawed than Zero. "Although, if you do want to go around the base now, would it be a good idea for me to put my defense program back on so that you and I can link? That way, you can let me know if anything's bothering you without being blunt about it? I don't want to have you upset again. Earlier was bad enough."

Rock nodded slowly, considering X's words. A change in what you understood as reality meant that a lot of variables that you thought you knew were untrue and possibly unknown. "I'll try not to…make them worry more," even if there was a lot that Rock didn't understand. "I'd like to be able to link to you again," Rock added, realizing that yes, X's defense program was offline. "I think it'll be easier if I could."

Despite the fact that he'd not been fidgeting with them as he had earlier, X hadn't failed to notice Rock wearing Blues' gloves. Smirking as the visor dropped over his eyes, he quickly reset the feed to his right eye and reached out to Rock, establishing a connection. "If you'd like, we can stop off at Loceida's room while we're out, let her see the gloves, and she should be able to make you a pair that actually fit." He was sure that Blues would appreciate getting the clothing back as it was. Getting to his feet, he moved for the door. "You ready to go?"

Rock's face brightened considerably at the possibility of getting his own pair and he nodded enthusiastically, both physically and over the link. Rock wanted to bounce over and hold X's hand, but X wasn't solid enough for that, so instead he moved to stand close to X, looking at the crackly energy that his body was composed of. Hesitantly, Rock reached out to touch X's arm anyway, not moving quite so forcefully as the first time he'd tried touching him. He was tingly and a little bit warm, like a hologram with a current running through it.

X forced extra energy into the arm Rock was touching, forcing the limb's data to condense enough that he could sort-of hold his brother's hand, and he pulsed a signal of reassurance through their link. "Where do you want to go first?"

Rock paused, considering. The reassurance over the link helped: Rock was a little bit nervous without Blues there, especially after all that'd gone on that day, but X seemed really nice even if he was yelling at Blues, and Blues said it was okay for Rock to go with him. "Blues was working on mechaniloids, right? Can I see them?"

"Alright, then, Rocinolle's lab it is." X smirked. "Actually, Loceida's room is on the same level, so we can stop there first to let her get the designs and measurements for your gloves. Sound like a plan?"

Rock nodded, "Okay." He did like the idea of getting gloves and he knew they had to be measured and tried on, that they weren't as one-size-fits-all as socks or hats.

X moved for the door, waiting for it to open again before stepping out, trying to keep Rock's hand in his own as he moved. Walking down the hall, X's eyes flitted over the identification fob on the door next to Zero's again, and he frowned. "Rock, can you do me a favor? That little button there on Room Three's door is an identification fob that lets people know who's using the room. Can you check to see who that's assigned to?"

Rock had been occupied with checking the new lock scramble on the door and oh, wow, Blues really ramped up the difficulty. Rock knew it wasn't for the sake of keeping him out of the room, but maybe he should keep himself busy until Blues got up. It'd look odd if he was standing, staring, at the door for an hour or so. The child had been glancing back, but when X asked him to check the fob, Rock redirected his attention to the door and reached out to touch the fob, blinking in confusion at the answer. He looked up to X, a little bit nonplussed. "X, this is _your_ room." Didn't X know that?

X simply sighed. "I guess I should have realized Zero was serious about assigning me a room when he mentioned that before." Well, if nothing else, the blonde's stubborn nature hadn't been at all affected by a century in that pod. "Let's get upstairs," he said, heading for the lift.

Rock blinked again, but followed X, moving to keep pace with him so they could continue to 'hold hands'. X couldn't pull him along the way Blues did and Rock wondered if being unable to really touch anything ever upset him.

X reached out for the controls to the lift, summoning it down to their floor and queuing it for the fifth once it arrived. He sighed, a tremor passing along the link with Rock, as he fought to keep his ascension pace in time with the lift.

"If it's easier, you can just fly up and I can meet you on the floor," Rock offered. It took him but a moment to understand where that emotional tremor originated from and, really, if that way was easier for X, he didn't want to make him try to keep up with the elevator.

"It's alright," X assured him. "As often as I've accidentally fallen through something, I'm just a little sick of it happening because my attention is elsewhere. Besides," he said as the lift came to a stop, "we're here. Let's get you to Loceida's, hm?"

Rock nodded; it must be hard, only being able to keep a single train of thought at once. X was clearly frustrated by it, and he'd never experienced being able to keep multiple. His grip on X's hand would have tightened, but then he'd have gone right through his brother, so Rock kept his grip constant and instead sent a feeling of affection over the link. He was happy X was doing this for him.

Laughter trickled over the link, and X had to stop for a moment, looking at Rock as he actually started giggling a bit. "I just…" He waved his hand dismissively. "It just struck me that I'm busy leading you around and playing the big brother role when I'm actually the baby of our family." The height difference between them didn't really help much in getting X out of that mindset. "Anyway, fourth door on the right side of the hall is where we're going, so if you'd like to knock?"

Rock grinned at X, though right now, X was the bigger brother, wasn't he? Rock's memory files were so corrupted that his own systems designated him as a newbuilt. He knew there was more there, a lot more, but he didn't have access to any of that data right now and he needed to learn. Maybe the irony of it was why X was laughing. Rock may have bounded ahead had Blues been there, too, but he didn't break his grip on X, tenuous as it was, and knocked on the door once they got to it, glancing up to X.

The door opened after a moment, a taller brunette standing with her hand against the control panel for the door. "Master X, Master Rock, a pleasure to see you both, although I wasn't expecting company." Behind her, there was an evident disorganization, mostly of the same color as the uniform Rock was wearing.

"Cerveau found out we were short on something for the new members, huh?" X said, noticing the piles of fabric strewn about the small room. "Where's Autruche? He usually helps you with this."

"He got called topside to help Doigt with repairs on the turrets. Thankfully, from what he's said, the damage was minimal, though they may need Rocinolle to help with repairing the casing. I'm still shocked to know that your son defected, but I am glad to hear it."

"I'm fairly certain we're all thankful for Phantom's presence here, though I will be honest in saying that I hope we can get my other three out of the city before things hit the fan." He looked again at the mess of fabric. "I hope I'm not being an inconvenience, though, since the whole reason I brought my brother here was to see if you'd be able to make him a pair of gloves." He motioned for Rock to give her Blues' gloves. "The pattern shouldn't be too difficult, but the pair he's got are a bit large on him."

Rock handed her the gloves with a smile as he glanced back at X: they…would be getting the gloves back, right? He hoped so; Blues didn't like not wearing gloves. He couldn't imagine why they wouldn't return them, though. "You have to measure my hands, right?" Rock asked in a slightly quiet voice, looking back up at Loceida.

Loceida nodded, turning the gloves over in her hands a few times. "I have to get the pattern figured out first, but that won't take too long." Human-like or not, they still processed information like machines. "This is a very distinct design. You want your pair to be an exact duplication, right?"

Rock nodded emphatically. "If you don't mind?" Despite his polite phrasing, his eyes had become round and eager, very obviously excited at the prospect.

She quickly scanned the gloves, saving the image files before noting the particulars of the design. "Alright. It'll take me some time because I want to get the uniforms done first, but I should have them finished by late tomorrow. Maybe sooner, depending on how long Autruche can help and if he'll even finish with the turrets today. Sun's going down, so they've got maybe three more hours of light before they have to call it quits." She handed the gloves back to Rock. "May I see your hands?"

Rock carefully folded the gloves and pocketed them before offering her his hands, watching her movements curiously, his head tilted slightly.

Loceida took the smaller robot's hands in her own, systems carefully recording measurements and recalculating the design specifications to ensure that all the intricate stitching would be preserved. Her left eye faded out for a moment before forming what looked like a small targeting matrix. "You've got a very smooth structure," she noted, the eye scanning to double-check her measurements. "Your creator took great care with your construction." Her eye returned to normal after a moment. "Alright, I'm done. Like I said, I should be able to have them done by tomorrow, so if you'd like to come by, you're more than welcome to." She bowed politely to them both. "Is there anything else I can help with?"

"If Rock has anything else he'd like," X said, looking at Rock.

Rock smiled at Loceida's words, but didn't voice that he couldn't remember Doctor Light. He knew from Blues that he was raised in Doctor Light's home in the same manner as a human child, and that meant that Rock meant a _lot_ to the human, but all of those memory files were inaccessible right now. "No, that's all," Rock said, still smiling, "thank you." None of Blues' clothes were in disrepair and his own were brand new. He did, however, take note of this Reploid in case he did need something in the future. Cloth did wear down in time, after all.

"Take care, Loceida," X said. "Let's see if Rocinolle's got any more of the mechaniloids up and running. She's been working herself pretty hard since Blues started helping her." Moving from the room, he and Rock continued down the hall.

"Anna, Raul, you put that poor little Shellcrawler down! She's not a ball!" Rocinolle's voice echoed out of the lab. "No, bad Garm! Sit. _Sit!_"

X and Rock walked into the room just in time to see Rocinolle grabbing a small yellow object off of the floor, the unit uncurling somewhat in her arms.

"Sit and stay!" Rocinolle ordered, putting the Shellcrawler down on a nearby table. "It's okay, Lana," she said, petting the mechaniloid. "They're not going to be mean to you again."

X quietly cleared his throat.

"Oh!" Rocinolle said, standing quickly. "I'm sorry, I didn't hear you come in, Master X." She bowed. "A pleasure to meet you in person, Master Rock. I hope that Blues-sensei is doing well." She was really going to need his help in the morning. If the Garm were acting this much like the canines they were modeled after…

Lana was going to end up bunking in her dorm overnight, she realized.

It took Rock a minute to remember to respond to Rocinolle because _puppies_. He immediately pulled the Garm units, recognizing them as a product of Blues' coding efforts, and thus his subservient units, though they seemed to be directed to serve the Resistance when he didn't have orders for them. The two Garm units bounded over to him, every inch of their bodies wriggling in delight, but they didn't jump on him and, instead, sat down as he directed so he could pet them. "Hello, Rocinolle, it's nice to meet you." Blues mentioned her in passing when he first got Rock up, explaining that he had something to do, but he'd be back, then told Rock to defrag and run file maintenance so he'd be able to function smoothly. "Blues is okay, he's just defragging right now," since he'd been going nonstop for a week with no rest, no maintenance, no nothing, and on top of that, who could say how long it'd been since his last full defrag before they were shut down, and even if it'd been recent, the centuries of being offline would require a lot of cleanup.

X looked around the room at the numerous units that were up and running around. "Pretty impressive for a week," he noted. "They're all behaving, this little incident aside?"

Rocinolle nodded. "Yeah. Anna bumped into Lana," which had engaged the Shellcrawler's self-defense programming, "and as soon as she curled up, Raul and Anna seemed to get the idea that she was a ball or something. I just hope they'll stop this because I really don't want to find out they tried to bite her to pieces while I was in my pod for the night." She pet the Shellcrawler again. "And it's good to hear that Blues-sensei is taking some time for himself. He seemed…distracted lately." She turned and whistled, a short series of high-pitched notes, and a purple Condoroid unit launched from a nook in the wall nearby, alighting on her arm. "Although he should be happy to see what I did with my first homework assignment, even if it did take me almost four days to finish. Gregory, say hello to Masters X and Rock."

The Condoroid blinked for a moment, its head ticking a few times to either side as it looked at the two newcomers, and then squawked.

Rock brightened considerably at the sight of the Condoroid and he walked over to say hi, forging a link with the unit and introducing himself. "Blues had you work on this one's programming?" Rock asked, considering the Condoroid. He'd have to see the before-and-after to tell how much of an improvement it was, but just by glancing? It was working well. "He said that the mechaniloids here were using an improper language set for their coding and that he was helping with transitioning them." Well, that was a far kinder interpretation of what Blues actually did say of the programming skills of this time period. "I think he was wanting to bring me up here anyway." Rock grinned up at Rocinolle. "He's fond of giving homework assignments." Rock had one of his own, after all. "I think he'll be happy with the work you did."

"Yeah," Rocinolle agreed. "The coding language he's been teaching me has been doing wonders with getting these guys up to snuff, but it's a pain and a half to learn. It's basically forcing me to unlearn everything I thought I knew about coding just to be able to start from the ground level again." She smiled, reaching up to pet the Condoroid. "Not that I'm really complaining, seeing how much it's helped. I just…I feel like I wasted ten years learning coding when it wasn't the coding I needed for the things I enjoyed doing. At least it'll help when it comes to all my future assignments."

"And that little pet project of yours that got you marked by the city?"

Rocinolle's eyes went wide for a moment. "I haven't even brought that up with Blues-sensei, Master X. I'm…" She looked down. "I'm not yet ready to try and work on that unit. I've still got far too much to learn."

"True as that may be through your eyes," X said, smiling at the memories playing in his mind, "I'm certain my brother would be interested in seeing that a mechaniloid from his era survived this long. Why don't you go in back and grab your little friend? Maybe Rock here can help get him up and running again."

The mechanic looked at Rock. "You know Sensei's coding set?"

"Coding set?" Rock blinked. "Yes, we all used…well, everyone had their own personal style, but at its core, we all spoke the same 'language' when we addressed programming issues," even if programming wasn't really Rock's main focus. "I'm very familiar with Blues' programming style, though."

Rocinolle nodded before raising her arm a bit, the Condoroid returning to his perch as the Reploid darted into the back room.

With round eyes, Rock turned and looked up at X. "What mechaniloid are you talking about?"

X smirked. "How's about I not spoil the surprise? She keeps it wrapped up in a protective cloth all the way in back, so it shouldn't take her long to find. She's been learning coding to try and get it running again, even though her role within Neo Arcadia did not permit her that kind of access. I'm fairly certain she wouldn't mind some help, though, considering that the mechaniloid she has is likely older than I am."

Rocinolle appeared out of the back room, a large bundle of cloth nestled in her arms. She quickly moved for the table next to the one with the Shellcrawler on it, laying the bundle down as if it were a sacred relic, though her movements were a little labored, considering the weight of whatever it was she was carrying.

Considering the age and her respect for the mechaniloids as a whole, it _was_ sacred to her.

Carefully, Rocinolle began to unbundle the layers of fabric, moving each one aside gently, as if fearing that too great a disturbance would destroy the precious item swaddled within. As the last layer of cloth moved aside, she looked up at Rock. "Master Rock, do you recognize this unit?"

Rock inhaled audibly, his eyes round as saucers as he approached the examination table and took the unit in both hands, lifting it easily despite its weight and holding it at eye level. "Where did you _find_ this?"

"There are several Metalls still moving around in the city proper, but this one I found abandoned on the outskirts of the city. I was working on repairing the security system for one of the residential facilities and found him under a pile of debris in the basement. Took him home with me that night, started learning coding from a friend, tinkered with his code and his internals every now and again. I still haven't been able to get him running again, and I've tried everything I could think of. Even changed out the power cell and charged him up."

Rock turned the Met in his hands, looking at its hard hat, round eyes, and little feet. "It's cute," Rock almost whispered, eyeing the little unit like it was a new puppy. "You called it a…Metall? The name I know these units by is Mettaur. They're versatile. And tricky to get by when they're acting as guard units," since their hard hats were nigh impenetrable. Rock suspected that Blues' shield was the same material. "Do you want me to help you get him running?" Rock asked Rocinolle, turning his wide-eyed gaze to her, almost trembling with his excitement. He _wanted_ to help. So, so much.

"I'd love for you to," Rocinolle said, looking at the unit in Rock's hands, a little surprised by how easily he'd been able to lift the heavy mechaniloid. "However, it may not be something I should be doing now. Sensei wanted me to get the Kerosh running again within the next couple of days and I really don't want to fall any more behind on the rest of our mechaniloids than I already am. If you'd like, though, I'll tell Sensei to let you know when we're working on him so that you can help."

Rock smiled at Rocinolle again. "Yes, if you have other units that the base needs up, they should come first. But we'll have this little one running before long," and the way Rock said it, it sounded like a promise. Carefully, Rock placed the Mettaur back onto the swaths of cloth it was being kept in. As he stepped back from the table, Rock realized that something was…different. Rock's systems may have gone into alarm if a familiar system didn't greet him and check him over clandestinely, keeping low so as to not alert X. Had he stayed hidden even after Rock sensed him, then Rock would have known that he was in trouble. But for him to say hello? Rock glanced down at the floor, catching sight of a darkness in one of the shadows, a subtle change in shade that quickly faded.

Rock turned then, not breaking his rhythm of movement, careful not to look like something surprised him as he told Rocinolle, "I can help with those too, if it's okay."

"Thank you again for your offer, Master Rock," Rocinolle said. "I'll keep it in mind with the Metall…or Mettaur, if that is preferred, but I want to do this by myself for right now, at least with the Kerosh, to make sure that I have the coding right. I don't mean offense, but I do want to prove myself to Sensei. Now that I finally have a teacher that's showing me the right way to help these little ones, I'd like not to present myself as if I'm…slacking."

X smiled, resting a hand near Rock's shoulder as he reached for him across the link. '_I can tell you're excited, but weren't there a few others you wanted to meet or talk to? The base is going to be winding down in the next few hours and most everyone will be going to sleep._'

Rock blinked, but nodded to Rocinolle. He understood wanting to learn. He looked up and back at X when he put a hand by Rock's shoulder. '_Oh, I almost forgot,_' that the Reploids need sleep, '_but yes, there are others I should meet._' Rock wondered if Blues also went around and met everyone. He highly doubted it.

"Thank you for your time," X said, watching Rocinolle wrap the Mettaur carefully. "Blues should be up and about again tomorrow, so hopefully you'll be able to let him see how you've been doing so far and perhaps show him that as well?"

Rocinolle smiled, hefting the mechaniloid into her arms to take it back to the box on the shelf where she'd been keeping him. "Thanks so much for coming to say hi," she answered, "and I'll make sure you're here when I start working on this little one."

"Where to next?" X asked as Rocinolle walked into the storage area of her lab.

"Where does Alouette stay?" Rock asked as one of the Garm units, Raul, trotted back up to him to be pet. "And…is it okay if this one comes with?"

"She's in a room near Ciel's on the second level." The young Reploid's similarity to Roll, now that Blues' memory file had reminded X of what his older sister looked like, had not been missed by the elf, and he idly wondered if Rock had made the comparison. "As for Raul, you'll have to ask Rocinolle."

"Ask me what?"

"Is it okay if I take this unit with me?" Rock was half-hugging Raul now and the mechaniloid was practically squirming with delight at the attention.

"Sure, I don't see why not. Probably be good for him to get out and about anyway." She thumbed towards the green Garm. "You want to take Anna, too?"

Rock's face lit up. "Is it okay?" Letting him borrow both units, was she really okay with it? Rock's signal was positively thrumming with how happy he was and he could feel Blues' immense approval that they were making him happy, even as bogged down with maintenance as he was.

"They've been practically bouncing off the walls for the past hour or so. They'd appreciate it, I think, and if I'm understanding what was said about you and Sensei, you're probably the best person for them to be around out of everyone here at the base."

Rock nodded: that was true and he didn't even mean that in a bad way. None of these Reploids could link at all. X could do the most out of any of them, but they really weren't Robot Masters. The other unit, Anna, trotted right up to stand beside Raul, both Garm units very obviously delighted, but doing their best to contain themselves. "Thank you."

X smiled at his brother, heading out of the room. He didn't try to take Rock's hand this time, letting the robot run a little bit ahead of him, both of the Garm trotting alongside like an honor guard. A very happy honor guard, X amended, if their wagging tails were any indication. "You want to signal the lift? I probably should have let you do that last time so that you can get used to moving around the base."

"Sure!" Rock was much more confident now, more relaxed now as he reached out to the lift, feeling around with it before finding the signal he wanted to hit, then requesting it to stop at their floor, then carry them to the second floor.

Unseen by all, Shadow followed X and Rock from the lab, staying hidden in Rock's shadow. He'd been woken abruptly and while Proto Man had provided him with a briefing of sorts, it was immediately evident that there were more unknowns than knowns. He was provided with the year and the basic rundown of the situation, with Proto Man's condition and Rock's memory loss. With the single remaining city on the planet, its distorted leader, and the desperate situation of the citizens. Shadow really didn't feel any degree of empathy for the city or its people, but this situation with Rock and Proto Man? His only regret was that it took so long—a whole hour!—for him to arrive at the base and locate Rock. He'd stopped by Proto Man first, verified that he was well, then darted off for Rock since he was the one wandering about. Blues, at least, was behind a locked door.

And what was this entity with Rock? Proto Man identified it as Mega Man X, but where was his body? What happened to him? What _was_ he? Shadow knew better than to bother a Robot Master while they were trying to defrag, so instead he began writing up a long list of questions and unknowns. He was on the networks here (there was no security! None whatsoever!) and could listen in. And while Rock was on a tour, well…Shadow would learn a lot.

Like right now, how he found the floor plan for the base and now had it memorized.

Shadow just had to listen to Rock speak, see his unsure body language and hear his voice, to register him as a newbuilt. He didn't even need to know that only twenty-three percent of his memory files remained intact to know that, right now, Rock was incredibly young. And even if Rock remembered how to fight, he was still vulnerable.

But that was fine. Rock wouldn't need to fight: that's what Shadow was here for.

"That door there," X said, pointing as they moved off the lift and towards the dorms. "That's Alouette's."

Rock nodded and hesitated only a moment before knocking: she'd seemed upset with Blues, so he hoped she wouldn't stay mad at him, or be mad at Rock.

Alouette looked up from her desk, accidentally knocking over her stuffed animal. "Oh, Shira-chan, I'm so sorry!" Carefully, she picked up the plush kitten, hugging it against her body and petting its head in a soothing manner. "I'll be there in a minute!" she called out. Pushing herself from the desk, she walked over to the door, wireless signal opening it for her, and her eyes went wide in delight at the two forms outside her door. "Mister X, Mister Rock!" she cried happily. "Shira-chan and me are happy to see you!"

"Shira-chan and _I_," X corrected. "And I'm happy to see you as well, Alouette. I'm surprised to see you in here, considering Ciel's working with Arnue tonight."

"Sis didn't need me to stay too long. She got sleepy and went to bed early." She looked at Rock. "I think your big brother made her feel bad, but she'll be okay. She doesn't get mad at people that much and her work makes her forget things. Mister Blues could be a little nicer though. He scared Shira-chan, 'specially with those things he wears over his eyes." Alouette didn't want to admit that not being able to see someone's eyes upset her as much as it did.

That it upset Ciel hadn't helped.

"You mean his sunglasses?" Rock blinked. Did they…not have those anymore? He frowned slightly at what Alouette said about Blues. He…given the circumstances, Rock fully understood the way Blues was acting, but he had to remember how Blues seemed when he was still a stranger, when he hadn't made a whole lot of sense. "Are they…something that isn't worn anymore?" Rock glanced back at X: he'd have a better chance of recognizing them for what they were.

"Those…those are sunglasses?" Alouette asked. "I've never seen them look like that." Then again, she'd not been around humans as much as some of the older Reploids at the base and it wasn't common for Reploids to wear them since they were able to adjust the light input to their optics. "Why does Mister Blues need sunglasses anyway?"

"Yes, he always wears something." Even in bed, his arm covered his eyes. "He…well, only humans need them, but he's worn them as long as I've known him." Rock had his own theories as to why, but he didn't voice them. "He…comes off as mean sometimes, I know, but he's a really nice person. He's just…" Rock trailed off, trying to think of a way to phrase this without saying too much. "He can be intimidating, but he's not a bad person," Rock finally said. This was dancing around several topics that Rock really didn't want to talk about, dancing around several issues that he was absolutely certain that Blues wanted no one knowing about. Like how his own programming was at war with itself, how he had to deal with constant pain every day. That would make anyone cranky.

Alouette shrugged, though her grip on her stuffed cat had tightened a bit. "I guess so. Even Mister Phantom is scary, but he's a good guy too, right?" It'd just take her time to get used to the new additions around the base. "Oh!" she said, finally noticing the Garm that had walked in behind Rock. "Puppies! Can I pet them?"

"Sure! Rocinolle told me I could borrow them," which was really nice of her. "These are Anna and Raul. Blues fixed them up." Rock stepped aside so Alouette could pet them. Honestly, the Garms' tails hadn't stopped wagging since they stepped foot outside of Rocinolle's lab.

Alouette made a delighted sound, then realized that she was still holding her kitten. "Oh, wait." She ran to the bed, carefully placed the toy against the pillow, and moved back to the dogs, petting them. "They're cute," she said. "Is Miss Rocinolle letting you keep them?"

Rock's eyes widened at the idea. "I didn't ask to keep them," because that'd be a lot to ask, "but I think she'll let me play with them either way." These Garm…their Master was technically Blues, if only because Rocinolle couldn't properly master them. "Do you have any pets?" He liked animals.

"Yes, I do. Miss Neige and Mister Hirondelle found them for me. They said that the ones I have are a lot smaller than the ones that…that…Mister X, I can't remember her name."

"Leviathan," X informed her. "My daughter," he explained to Rock, "who has been tasked with caring for the world's oceans. Most of her troops and scouts are aquatic in nature."

"That was her name!" Alouette said cheerily. "Guardian Leviathan uses bigger ones than what I have, but they're the same design." She moved to another part of the room, swiping her hand over a small impression in the wall, and a light flickered on, revealing a decently-sized tank. Inside were a small group of yellow and white mechaniloids, darting around the tank as the light flicked on. "They're small Jangyo fishies," she said.

Rock looked mystified by the tank itself. He walked over and pressed a hand gently to the glass, considering the container before looking at the mechaniloids within, watching them dart to and fro in the water. He could tell just by brushing his aura against theirs that they were happy in that tank. "They're really cute," Rock said with a smile, watching them for a few more moments before looking back to X. "If Guardian Leviathan is your child, then she is my…" Rock trailed off for a moment, digging for the word, "my niece?"

"Yes," X answered, moving closer to the tank and watching the Jangyo swim around. "Alouette, did you remember to feed them today?"

The young girl gasped, then turned for the desk, grabbing a small container from the top drawer. "Mister Rock, do you want to feed the fishies?" Walking up to Rock, she passed him the metal cylinder.

Rock accepted the container, but looked down to it, confused. "How much do I give them?" And…what was it?

"It's pieces of smooshed Energen Crystals, and you don't give them too much. Just pour some into the top of the bottle and then sprinkle the crystals." She smiled softly. "They get really excited when you feed them." She turned to X. "Mister X, when we can go back to Neo Arcadia, are you going to come feed my fishies too?" She started to laugh, a small mirthful sound at the idea, but stopped. "Mister X, what's wrong with your eye?"

X blinked, taking a moment to realize what Alouette was referring to. His right eye was a solid sheet of black, keeping external stimuli from interfering with his ability to read the defense system's data, and it startled him a bit that Alouette had been the first to notice. Or, at least, the first to say anything. "There's nothing wrong, Alouette," he assured her. "I have a new program running, and it's easy for me to see it with this eye turned off. And yes, once we move back to the city, I'll come feed your fishies."

Alouette's smile returned full force at that.

X looked to Rock. "The Jangyo in the tank don't have a means of recharging, so we feed them Energen Crystals instead. A few are all they need each day, but put a little extra than what you might think they need. If Alouette hasn't fed them yet, a small bit more won't hurt them any."

Rock did as Alouette instructed, carefully tipping the crystal flakes into the cap, then letting a bit more out before turning to the tank and slowly sprinkling them along the water's surface, startling a little bit at how quickly the Jangyo reacted, each of them coming to the surface to eat the crystals. His face broke into a big smile as the Jangyo's collective happiness radiated from them and into his aura, warming him with good feelings.

"Do you like the fishies, Mister Rock?" Alouette said, currently busying herself by petting Anna. "Miss Rocinolle said that she might have to fix their codes soon to make them swim more like real fishies. Do you think they'll be as friendly as the Garm are now that they're all better?"

Rock smiled as he turned back to look at Alouette and X. "I think they'll be very friendly once they're repaired," especially if Blues was the one to do it. He'd know that they were Alouette's, and Blues always seemed to know what to do to make little ones happy.

Alouette smiled. "I hope so. I like watching them swim around when I'm in my room and don't really have anything to do," but she'd always wished that they'd be okay with being pet the way Shira-chan was.

"Rock, we should be leaving soon. Alouette may be a Reploid and not need as much time to sleep as Ciel, but I don't want her too excited before bedtime." The young Cyber Elf handler had a penchant for playing monkey-see, monkey-do with Ciel, which could lead to a delay with Ciel's work if Alouette was up past her scheduled recharge time. It didn't help that the girl had developed Ciel's habit of finding 'reasons' to stay awake. "I want you in bed soon, Alouette. Ciel went to bed early today, so she's going to need your help a little earlier than normal, I think."

She bobbed her head. "I know, Mister X. I was just telling a story to Shira-chan before I put her to bed."

"It was good to see you again, Alouette. I hope you sleep well," Rock said politely. He didn't want to keep her awake, especially not if she needed the recharge time. From what he was hearing, four hours or so was the norm for Reploids, but Blues would be down for…another eight, almost nine, so he could curl up with him for a bit while hooked up to Blues for charging.

"I'm glad you came to visit," she said cheerily. "Maybe we can play tomorrow?" She looked to X; would that be alright when Blues would be awake again?

"I think that will be okay," Rock said, tilting his head slightly. He was honestly glad that two familiar signals, Robot Master signals, brushed against his instead of just one. Knowing Shadow, he was meticulously going through every document and every exchange in the network's log, gathering as much intel as he could, including gossip, for future use. Blues' aura was content and a little bit hazy, a little bit distracted because of his maintenance. It was nice.

"Anywhere else tonight?" X asked as they stepped out of Alouette's room. "Or do you want to head down to your room and settle in for the night? I know it's still early," and that was said with a shrug.

"Is everyone going to bed now?" Rock asked. He didn't want to head back down to begin his 'homework' quite yet, but if X was getting tired too, he didn't want to keep him up.

"Well, a few of them probably are, but most everyone will just be settling in for the night, doing maintenance, chatting on the comm net. Little stuff to wind down their day, especially after how…" X looked around guiltily, "how hectic things have been. Phantom should probably be in a charger now, but I'm sure he's busy telling the Elf War stories to Zero just because." His youngest child had idolized Zero for years after hearing his father's stories.

"Do you think he'd be too tired for us to come and visit him again?" Rock asked as Anna nosed at his hand to be pet. He wanted another chance to talk to Phantom, had a few questions for him. Rock hoped it would be okay.

Had Shadow been on the physical plane, he'd have jumped out of his proverbial skin. _What_ did X just say? _Zero? The Zero unit was here?_ Now Shadow's mission here made a lot more sense. Of course Proto Man didn't want Rock unattended. And the child wouldn't be unattended.

It almost made Shadow wish there were two of him.

Shadow's systems were configured as a chemical fabrication lab. He could concoct poisons for humans and binary scramblers and other nasty things to offline robots and androids alike. Now knowing that the youngest of the Wily line was here, too?

Well, Rock was a lot more helpless than Zero, especially as he was.

"Phantom was built with decent core specs, so even with the short charge he had in Cerveau's, he'll be fine being awake a few hours longer. Plus, he'll be plugged into Zero's charger, and like I said before, he's probably regaling Zero with stories of the wars. When he was still a newbuilt, Phantom broke into my chambers a few times just to poke me awake at ridiculous early hours so he could hear 'a little bit more' about him." X smiled. "He and Harpuia both trained with sabers because they looked up to Zero…well, the idea I gave them of him, anyway." He motioned towards the lift. "If you want to head down there now, let's go."

Rock nodded and reached for X's hand again, even if they couldn't solidly touch. "I'd like that," very much.

X took the offered hand, heading for the lift, comforted that the young robot was okay being around people that Blues showed an obvious disdain for.

Turning the corner, X pulled a little closer to Rock as a familiar Reploid stepped out of one of the rooms.

Canard looked up, then scowled when he realized that X was accompanied by one of the two robot units from Neo Arcadia. "Hey, you," he said, looking to Rock, "you best tell your brother or master or whatever the hell he wants to call himself that—"

"Canard, hold your tongue," X warned, his voice dropping low as he let go of Rock's hand. "I will not tolerate you speaking ill of either of my brothers, especially in my presence."

"No disrespect, Master X, but I don't care how old they are or what they are to you. Those units," he said, pointing to Rock, "that little brat included, need to learn—"

X's entire body had flared to bright azure as the Reploid continued, and he made a point to let the energy lance away from him on the visible plane, three orbs of cerulean impacting against Canard's head, throat, and chest. "I warned you," X said, his voice threatening, "and you not only disregard _me_, you _insult_ _my brother_, who has done nothing to earn your scorn." Delving into the Reploid's motor and speech controls, X forcibly offlined his vocal processor as he stepped forward, glaring daggers at the unit as he fell to his knees. "I have allowed you within my Resistance, let you continue acting as you have towards everyone because you think you have the right to let your personality exist in whatever fashion you deem worthy, but the unit here that needs to learn respect is you. I grow far too tired of your indignant attitude towards others because you still feel slighted, still hold so tightly onto the betrayal of the city despite how well we have all treated you." This wasn't the first time that Canard had chosen to verbally assault another, but X was going to do what he could to ensure that it was the _last_. "The unit that needs to understand his place is the one on his knees before me." X tightened his chokehold on Canard's internal charge tanks, reducing the output flow to several of his secondary components. "I gave you a second chance at life because my copy thought you too dangerous to the citizens of the city, too uncontrollable. Does it scare you to know that I am starting to agree with him?"

Canard's eyes betrayed the fear that he tried to hide behind his irate façade.

"I will release my hold on you," X said, "but if you make any move, dare to speak as you have to my family, you will find yourself on the wrong end of a greater wrath than my own." X knew that Blues would not be so forgiving. "Go back to your quarters, Canard, and think if you really want to be remembered for the way you mistreated those that only tried to do right by you in a world that wants you dead."

The blue energy wrapped around X, cocooned around his arms, as it withdrew from Canard, and the Reploid darted down the hall and away from X.

"I'm sorry you had to see that," X apologized to Rock. "Canard has always been a thorn in my side, and I really should have addressed his attitude problem the day he decided he was in the mood to make Alouette cry." And for something as simple as chasing one of Ciel's Animal Elves through the hallways of the base. His body quickly reverted back to normal, his halo once more a luminescent spectrum of light.

When Canard began speaking in such a threatening tone, Rock's eyes widened in confusion. He tucked into X's side as the Cyber Elf locked Canard and chewed him out, eyes darting nervously between the two of them as both Shadow and Blues queried him. Shadow knew what was going on, was witnessing it, but the scans served to reassure Rock: nothing would happen to him, even if X had been unable to defend him. "Does he need to debug?" Rock asked X quietly, unable to think of any other reason for the abusive words.

Shadow, on the other hand, was regarding X with a new kind of interest and respect: so he could affect the world around him, and _resolutely_. What had he done to that unit to freeze him up so? This required research. He established a private communications line with Rock, '_Rock, is there a name for the entity type that X was converted to?_'

Rock blinked. '_He says it's called a Cyber Elf._' He would have asked why Shadow wanted to know, but Rock had an idea.

Shadow nodded somewhat over the link and began sifting through the other networks, looking for which was most likely holding a library-style database. He had some reading to do.

The image of a babysitter at the park, reading on the bench while the child played, came to mind. Except that as a Robot Master, he could keep track of both his charge and his reading at the same time.

"Rock," X said as they began walking again, offering his hand to his brother, "have you called the lift yet?"

Rock accepted X's offered hand, still minding his grip as he nodded to X, "I did, but I think it was dropping someone else off. It should be on its way."

And indeed he had, as the lift coasted to a stop at their floor as they moved toward the elevator shaft. Stepping on, X let himself hover a bit above the floor, moving down with the lift now that he wasn't trying to concentrate so hard on keeping his hand coalesced enough that Rock wouldn't pass through it as easily. He was thankful that the elder Light child was so willing to put up with his unique nature.


	17. Simple Comforts

_Apologies for the late update on this one: Midnyght's computer was on its deathbed, so she had to reformat, and I had to deal with some issues with my college. Busy days. The college issue is taken care of, though, as is Midnyght's computer! And no, nothing was lost, especially not any of Redemption._

_So, in this installment of Redemption, Phantom tells Zero a bedtime story, Rock gets socialized further, and he unlocks a rather unfortunate memory_ _in the process._

* * *

><p>X let his feet touch against the floor as they stepped off the lift on the sixth level, moving down the hall toward the dorms, though he remained silent as he moved.<p>

A voice filtered out from the door to Room Five as X and Rock approached it, and X smiled. He'd been right about Phantom telling Zero stories.

"We aren't fighting to hurt people," Phantom's voice echoed with words shouted at the monster that had caged the corrupted Dark Elf. "We…we just want to make a world where any two people can join hands! And the Great Destroyer roared, a sound that reverberated against the buildings that still stood against the ravages of war, echoed across the battlefield, and—"

X brushed his energy against the door, a soft chime cutting his son off mid-sentence.

Zero signaled the door to open, smiling as he pushed himself from his chair, eyes locked on Phantom rather than those that had come to visit. "I remember that," he said, smirking at the Guardian in the pod. "Omega," he spoke, recalling what he had said all those years ago, "after fighting myself, I finally understand. Now I know what I've been fighting for until now. Now I know what my hesitation was until now."

Phantom smiled, although tears were dotting the corners of his eyes, "And the Great Destroyer turned his eyes to the blonde warrior, whose emerald blade snapped to life, raised against his foe in a final act of defiance."

"Now I can finally say it. My power is not meant for destruction. My power…" and Zero inhaled deeply as the door shut behind X and Rock, "is for protecting the things my friends and I believe in!"

"The saber pulsed with new energy, with renewed power, and the warrior let loose three great waves that sent the scourge of the Wars to his knees, growling in pain and rage at the one that had made him falter." Phantom's eyes were positively _radiating_ as he watched Zero, the blonde moving into a battle stance, his hands mimicking the motions of raising a saber.

"Begone, my nightmare," Zero said.

"Farewell, my fate," X said, stepping forward as he released Rock's hand. "And with a cry that shook the very heavens, the two pillars of salvation unleashed the Final Strike, annihilated the Great Destroyer, and together, stood to greet the dawn of a new day." X remembered the story well from the nights so long ago. "And thus were the Elf Wars brought to their end, by power of saber and buster, by the might of two of ancient lineage and limitless power."

Rock looked between the three other units in the room with wide eyes, recognizing it for what it was: a _bedtime story_. Even if he couldn't remember any, he knew he'd been told them before. Even better, this story was about X and Zero, wasn't it? It sounded like an old epic, a tale of a long-completed war and its heroes.

And Phantom was positively _beaming_, even more so than Rock.

Rock knew that X and Zero both had been through a lot of wars, the same as him, and even though his memories were fragmented, he remembered enough to know that no war memory was really a good one. Even when Rock won, he still _lost_. No matter how hard he tried, no matter how much the Robot Masters tried to help…

Rock had to veto that train of thought. He knew it'd only make him very, very upset, and then Blues would have to get up and he didn't want to worry Blues when he needed to defrag so badly.

Shadow wove some reassurance through the link he had with Rock, though it wasn't the same as Blues or one of Rock's 'brothers' doing it. He was worried that even with his memories gone, the child would still blame himself for what happened, still try to shoulder all of the responsibility again.

Even though he was the most blameless of them all.

The Zero unit had been a concern, but now? Now it was a concern for an entirely different reason. Shadow knew that Doctor Wily programmed Zero to take out Mega Man, Mega Man X, Blues, the Lightbots, and, really, anyone Wily didn't like. Shadow knew that Zero would then have purged the planet of humanity.

Well.

The Zero unit was here, but so was humanity. So was X and, now, Rock and Proto Man. What the hell happened? Not that Shadow was complaining; he'd rather the unit not be murdering the entire planet because really, it was a disgusting task to be set to, but still. Something about the Zero unit wasn't functioning and really, that could be even more dangerous because what if that bit that was out of alignment suddenly realigned? Where would they be then?

Incinerated under the rubble of Neo Arcadia, no doubt. What was Proto Man thinking, staying here?

Shadow didn't know what was worse: not being able to map out what Blues was planning or knowing that even if he asked, he'd get a disapproving frown and a feeling over the network like, 'Figure it out for yourself.'

X turned to look at Rock as Zero moved over to Phantom, tucking the sheet around his waist again, the cloth having long ago been knocked away from his torso by the Guardian's still-bound hands in the midst of some sweeping gesture or another. "Sorry about that," he said, "but that was Phantom's favorite bedtime story, even if it was one that revolved around the last war."

"You took history and made it something worth listening to, worth learning. I think you once said that no matter how much of the world was shrouded in shadow by tragedy and loss, there will always be light somewhere to counter it and make the world whole again." Phantom smiled at Zero, glad he'd been able to tell the story in a way that inspired Zero to join in. "I hope we didn't offend you by not cutting the story short, Master Rock." Phantom was, of course, a little jittery at the fact that the younger of the progenitors was here without the elder and hoped that Rock being here wouldn't irk Blues.

Rock blinked: they were calling him 'master' again. They called Blues, X, and Zero that, too. Wasn't that confusing? And why were they calling Rock that? Wouldn't one of the others be a better choice? "No, it sounded like a good story," Rock said, even though he thought that stories that weren't about fighting were a thousand times better.

"Father told us many stories," Phantom said, "although that one still stands as my favorite. I'm sure my siblings, if you get a chance to meet them, would tell you the ones they thought the best."

X nodded. "I tried to make sure you all knew our history, but newbuilts are always so hard to get to listen if the tales are boring," a smirk at that, "and yet I recall finding you in Neo Arcadia's library for weeks afterwards reading the very history books you told me were 'too boring'."

"We all ended up doing that at some point. We wanted to know what was you telling a story and what was truth."

"Everything I told you was the truth," X said. "I just added a bit of shiny to it to keep you interested."

Zero smiled at X and Rock. "Why don't you two stop dawdling at the door and come sit down?" He dropped the wrong way into his chair, spinning a bit to face towards the bed. "If you'd like, Master Rock, you can sit on the bed."

Rock blinked at Zero and didn't move, his brow furrowing in confusion. "Why are you calling me _Master_ Rock?"

The blonde looked at the robot for a moment in silence. "It's a title that indicates honor or respect, sort of like how everyone here except for X tends to call me 'Zero-sama' or 'Master Zero'. Why, is there an honorific you prefer?"

Rock responded to Zero with a completely blank stare. If anything, Zero's explanation seemed to confuse Rock even _more_. An honorific? _Master_? Why was…why was Zero even _considering _it? "I…I don't understand why you're…" Rock trailed off, massively confused.

X blinked suddenly, as if something had caught his attention. "Rock, does this have anything to do with the Robot Master hierarchy? I remember what Blues said about the way that your social structure worked."

Zero looked at X. "Hierarchy? Like the Hunters?"

Rock looked even more lost as sea now. "What are the Hunters?"

X looked back and forth between Zero and Rock for a moment before turning to the blonde. "What do you remember?"

"The Maverick Hunters were a paramilitary Reploid organization that operated as a policing and investigative task force against any and all occurrences of Irregular mechaniloid or Maverick Reploid units," Zero said. "We worked to stop any unit that was acting faulty or glitchy. What units we could bring in were examined and their coding repaired, but the Reploids proved a lot more difficult when we realized that not only was a virus causing them to act against their programming, the virus was contagious. Within the Hunters, there was a clear military-like structure, starting with the Class D or Lieutenant Hunters and progressing up to the Special A, or Class SA, Lieutenant Commanders. X, Axl, and I were all Class SA by some point after the eighth Maverick War, and Commander Signas was our supervisor and the head of the organization." He look to X. "I'm still missing something, though. I know it."

X nodded. "Class E Hunter support, including our Navigators, and the base crews. Tech, logistics, engineering, medical; they were all Class E."

Rock blinked at X and Zero for a moment longer, absorbing what the two said, his head tilted. "It doesn't function the same way a military does," and Rock was sure now that Shadow explained some things to him rapidly over their link, "but there is a hierarchy. Blues told you about it? It…why are you asking a _newbuilt_, especially since Blues would be better? And…you can't even link, so how would that even _work_?"

X smiled as he dropped into the familiar hover. "You and Zero are looking at the same word through two different sets of eyes," X explained, finally getting what was going on. "To you, as a Robot Master, the term 'Master' denotes a superior unit, one that has earned your respect, that has the right to treat you as a subservient unit as long as they fulfill their duties, right?" He really hoped he'd gotten that right.

Rock nodded. "That's right." He'd essentially hit the nail on the head for a basic explanation. "So asking a unit with…my activated time is much longer, I know, but with my memory files as they are…" He wasn't ideal for guidance. Surely that was common sense?

X shook his head a little. "Because we, as androids or Reploids, think in the same manner as humans, the term 'Master' is applied differently than what you're familiar with. It is a title of honor given to someone out of respect. For someone to call Zero 'Master Zero' or my son by his proper title of 'Guardian Phantom' indicates that they are showing proper respect to their station. In the Maverick Hunters, I would have done this by referring to Zero as 'Lieutenant Commander Zero' and saluting before my own promotion, at least while we were on duty. Does any of that make sense?" X stopped for a moment. "Or maybe this is a little clearer. You know the memory file I provided you with earlier? You and I referred to our maker as 'Doctor' Light, but that wasn't his _given_ name. His name was Thomas Light. The use of 'Doctor' as a title meant that we were showing respect to him as someone who had earned a Doctorate degree in robotics."

Rock's head was tilted as he considered X's words. "But…why call a unit 'Master' when they haven't earned the title?" Doctor Light was actually a doctor, and Zero had actually been a Lieutenant Commander. None of these people were actually a master. Well, except Blues. X and Zero couldn't do it properly and Rock didn't have enough experiential data to take on the task.

"It has to do with the concept of who we are," X explained. "Zero and I have a very storied history that most everyone is aware of to some degree, and we are also exceedingly old units, even if Zero is in his second body. His mind is still his own, still that which made him who he is. The use of 'Master' by the Resistance members for us is in respect for our pasts. You and Blues are referred to as such because of your age. Even with the considerations taken because of what happened to your memory files, you are still far older than those here. You're also family to me, so special considerations are being made to not offend me by referring to you and Blues with honorifics."

Zero's brow furrowed. "Wait…" he said, looking to Rock, "maybe…" He stopped. "Mas…Rock, how much do you understand of the human concept of respect?"

Rock blinked again, considering. He had next to no experience with humans that he could remember. Everything was so fragmented and fuzzy and what he did remember mostly had to do with robots, with other Robot Masters. He didn't remember any humans _ever_ referring to any Robot Master with respectful prefixes. "I just…remember that there were a lot of layers in there, a lot of…saying what you're not thinking while keeping your true feelings secret, to try and keep from hurting feelings or…insulting others." It was a dizzying dance, especially to a species that were empaths. Why keep up a charade?

Zero nodded a bit. "Okay, well, that sort of helps. You don't have much of an understanding of what X is trying to explain and what you do have is from a perspective I don't really understand myself." He smiled softly at the unit. "Although I can kind of sympathize with you with the memory issues. Anyway, the idea of respect for humans or for Reploids," since, really, he and X fell under that umbrella term anyway, "is that a person is given an honorific because the one addressing them feels that they have done something worth acknowledging or are old enough that an honorific is mandated by societal etiquette. It's…sort of like how a younger human will address an older human as 'Mister' or 'Ma'am' just because age for them denotes a need for respect, even though there may not be an _actual_ reason for the respect to be given."

X nodded. "There is also the fact that 'Master' for us carries a negative connotation with the way you and Blues would apply it. 'Master', to me, does not mean that I have mastery or ownership over those that call me that because that particular definition is seen as offensive, as if I view someone as my property rather than as a person." This was starting to morph into a cyclical conversation that wasn't going to lead anywhere with Rock as he was at present. "Would it be easier for you, at least until you recover your memory files, if we stopped using titles with you?"

Rock nodded, and said in an apologetic tone, "It would. I…it's just that it's activating a lot of subroutines that don't apply to the situation, and even when I deny them, you say 'Master' that way again, and they activate again, and…" And it started over again. It was really laying into Rock's programmed instinct set and it felt like he was being pushed to do a task that didn't exist. It was a little upsetting. Zero's explanation provided a lot of clarity as well, helped clarify why the Reploids were doing it, so it was easier for Rock to provide a counterargument to the programming to get it to stay quiet.

"Makes me wonder if I should keep using the honorific with Master Blues, though," Zero said, turning to X. "I really don't want to find myself on the business end of his buster again because I didn't."

"His buster?" Rock sounded a little bit worried, but not outright surprised or alarmed that Blues aimed it at Zero. Or was it more that he wasn't surprised that Blues aimed it at anyone at all? "He…won't be offended if you drop the honorific. I don't think he, ah, 'adopted' you. He's better at circumventing programmed impulses than I am, so I don't think it was bothering him as much," or maybe it was that his other critical errors were so painful, so what was another little error message? Like a pinprick. "He retained his memory files, so I think he probably understands why you're using that term that way." Honestly, Rock would have asked Blues about it, but while he was doing maintenance… "He's…been frustrating a lot of people here, hasn't he?" Rock sounded almost apologetic about it.

"Wait," Zero said. "You're saying that the use of the honorific with…" he caught himself again "with Blues has him having to not see me as…" Zero stared at the wall for a minute. "Okay, I've officially confused myself."

X smirked. "Yes, Zero, Blues has the same subroutines," although X was certain that was a small part of why his brother _hadn't_ fired on Zero that day. "As for him frustrating people, it's more just us not getting why he's being so secretive. It may have something to do with his past, since I'm not as familiar with him as I am with you," and that was embellishing things a bit in that all X had known of Blues beforehand was second-hand data from Rock during his construction. "I think a larger part of why I am personally so…put off by his behavior is that I still end up thinking like a Lieutenant Commander, even so long after being decommissioned."

"And you weren't even a Lieutenant Commander that long," Zero teased. "You'd think I'd be having a bigger issue with that, seeing as I made SA…really quickly, I think. Was I Unit Commander of the Zeroth before or after I made SA?"

"You made SA first, before the first Maverick War. You took command of the Zeroth Shinobi Unit after the second."

"Shinobi Unit?" Phantom suddenly piped up. "You were the commander of a ninja unit?"

X laughed at the look on his son's face. "No, Phantom, not _actual_ ninja. The Zeroth Unit was a special ops and tactical strike team."

Rock considered X's words, frowning slightly. "What does being 'SA' have to do with Blues?"

"Being Class SA meant that we were the highest-ranking field members of the Maverick Hunters, second only to Hunter Commander Signas. When it came to information, _everything_ was need-to-know for us. There was very little room for anyone to tell us that we didn't need to know something, and more often than not, skirting issues or failing to supply the full details of an event or situation got lower-ranking officers reprimanded."

Rock looked a little bit horrified. "You were trying to reprimand _Blues_ and expected him to become more forthcoming?" Seriously? That was one of the single worst approaches to take to the eldest of the Robot Masters.

If that was the strategy X had been taking…no wonder he ended up screaming. Rock may have facepalmed if he remembered the gesture. "That's why you were yelling at him…don't…" Rock paused. "We consider it…rude for units that aren't our Masters to give orders." That and the Three Laws: if a human didn't word it as a request, if it was in the imperative… "And Blues does not accept others as his Master. That's not anything I've ever seen him tolerate. I've never inspected his coding that closely, but given what he is, it may be instinctive for him. So to give him orders, to demand that he do anything makes him shut down from you and from what you want. But X, I'm surprised, if you've been talking to him that way and he's still…" Still giving X the time of day… "He _really_ likes you."

"Like I've been trying to explain, there's a really wide gap in our understanding, in our worldviews," although he hadn't realized until Rock laid it out that he'd been trying to assert himself in an offensive way to Blues. "It'd probably be a good idea for me to apologize to him, though, if that's the case."

"Blues never had a Robot Master superior to him?" Zero said. "That's…part of me is wondering if that's why he reacted the way he did when I surprised him the other day. He doesn't take well to someone springing up from out of nowhere, does he? Not that I meant to startle him or anything, but if he's at the top of the hierarchy…"

"You think he responded badly to you dropping in unexpectedly because he saw it as a challenge to his place as the top-ranked of the…?" X looked at Zero, then Rock. "Something tells me you're reading his body language wrong." And that had nothing to do with the numerous displays X's scans had told him Blues had shut down.

"You _surprised_ him? That's when he drew his buster?" Rock looked worried, even if Blues had obviously emerged unscathed. "He's really hard to sneak up on, so during the wars, when someone did manage to, it was because it was an assassination attempt." Maybe that was why?

That was _not_ what Zero had intended at _all_. "Oh, wow. I hadn't…" He smiled weakly at X. "We both have some apologizing to do."

"Assassination attempt?" X asked, though he had nodded in agreement with Zero. What about his brother was he unaware of?

Now Rock glanced between X and Zero. Would bringing Doctor Wily up be okay? "They…during the wars, they always approached me from the front. But for Blues, if they fought him directly? They'd lose. Their programming wouldn't…" It was hard to win against a unit that your programming thought you should be working for. "Anyway, the only way to have a chance of winning with him was surprising and somehow incapacitating him, but then what? It got to the point where the aim was to kill him, but there was really only one unit that could sneak up and ambush him successfully, and even then, it was _hard_." Shadow Man never did kill Blues—he did have his own sense of ethics—but there were other reasons to bring Blues offline.

"And here I am thinking that we had it hard because Sigma, and then Weil and Omega, had it out for the two of us," Zero mused. "Well, the two of us in addition to the rest of the world, but really…"

X nodded. "I know what you mean, Zero," he said. "Although I will admit growing up in Doctor Light's lab has probably left me with a very skewed idea of the world from your time. I don't remember hearing a lot about fighting at all, but from what Blues said earlier, my construction took the span of four wars."

Zero snorted. "At least you remember that far back. I can barely piece together a century ago, much less three."

"I don't remember who else you would have had contact with during your construction, but _no one_ would have spoken about the wars in front of a newbuilt. They wouldn't have…brought up anything bad around you." Upsetting children with sad things? Never.

"Still, that means that there is a lot of data that I'm really not accounting for, a lot of events that I'm unaware of that are making my…perception of you and Blues a lot more messed up and incomplete than it should be."

"What of uncle?" Phantom asked, looking to Rock. "Would calling you Uncle Rock be alright?" Even if the title would really only apply to him and his siblings.

Rock couldn't help smiling a bit at Phantom's question. At least now he understood what 'uncle' meant. "That's fine with me." Really, 'master' was the only word that really woke up that programming set. Even Rocinolle calling Blues 'sensei' wasn't bringing that subsystem up. Then Rock turned back to X. "Blues has always been secretive and there's a lot…that he won't tell anyone. But please don't be angry with him for it. When I remember more about the wars, I can tell you about them, but right now, my memories are…they're really fragmented. I know we have more siblings than I can remember, but I can't even pull up visual data for some of the names I do remember." Rock frowned again, trying to pull up his DLN directory and receiving a nice 'Error' message in return. "Blues didn't want to give my any of his data or memories in case it…contaminates my own memory files, but maybe he can give you visual and profile data for everyone, at least?" So X would at least be able to see who they were, what they looked like?

"I'd like that," X said, "but I think that'd be something for me to ask Blues rather than have you do so in my place. Now that I understand part of where the failure in our communication lies, I can try to correct that in the future." And it was a good idea for him to learn. "I'm concerned, though, with the continued use of 'Master' for myself and Zero. That's not going to create a problem is it?" Since the title was being using in the human sense by the Reploids around them.

"No, since none of those units are either of ours, it won't affect our systems any if they call you 'master'," even if, in Rock's mind, the usage was completely wrong. "Blues…like I said, he must really like you, so if you ask, he'll do what he can so long as it isn't anything too…too upsetting." Or personal.

Phantom fidgeted a little, taking a deep breath as if trying to keep himself from falling asleep.

"Phantom, it's late and you've been taxing yourself," X said. "Get to sleep."

"I'm not tired, Father," Phantom returned. In reality, he wasn't, but the warm pulse of energy into his systems was trying to goad him into hibernation. He wanted to stay up as long as possible, especially now that the smaller progenitor, the nicer of his two uncles, was there in the room with him.

Rock considered Phantom, almost biting his lip as he debated whether to voice his concern. He didn't want to do the same thing to Phantom that Ciel's question had done to he and Blues. That had been awful. "I actually have a question, Phantom, but…I'm not sure if it's okay." Rock scanned the Guardian, though he had to bite back the urge to prompt for a link to monitor his emotional status.

Phantom looked at Rock for a moment, noticing the way his body language had shifted. "Uncle, why don't you sit down first? You look…" He stopped. "Please sit," he asked, smiling. "You'll be more comfortable than standing around."

Rock nodded and settled down on Zero's bed, shifting slightly on the mattress until he nodded, satisfied that he was comfortable. His legs dangled over the edge and he fidgeted for a moment before speaking. "When…when I hugged you, you started crying," and that was a sign of distress, so Rock's voice on the next question was nearly tremulous at the idea. "Did I hurt you?"

It took a minute for the Guardian to answer, fingers worrying the back of one hand as he tried to figure out how to answer that question. "Not…not in the physical sense, and not by hugging me," he finally replied. "It was…more out of relief, to know that you were okay. I was there, in the city, when Copy X…when he ordered what he did. I…Harpy and I," and he stopped again. "Harpuia is my eldest brother, the oldest of the AXR line, and was there with me when you and Uncle Blues were brought into Neo Arcadia. We…we both could see how much you looked like our father, so for the person who we thought _was_ our father to do what he did? To make the decision he had?" And Phantom was careful to avoid the topic. While he was certain the other had already told Rock of the events of the city, he did not want to cause undue stress to his uncle. "When it was revealed that the progenitor unit—Uncle Blues—had gotten out of the city and taken you with? It was a great relief, though I didn't tell anyone. Then to find him raiding the city, stealing parts from the manufacturing district?" Phantom shook his head. "I'd been holding back, holding in, any hope that you both had managed to survive, so to see you as you are?" It had been an overload for his emotional circuits.

Rock considered what he said, honestly trying to understand the emotional turmoil Phantom had to hide, even without much experiential data to compare it with. "I'm glad that I didn't hurt you. I was worried because crying is a human sign of distress, and it's part of a Robot Master's emotional display to indicate distress. I didn't realize you could cry because you were relieved," and now, Rock was relieved, too, even if he wasn't crying. "Blues told me what happened, but he refused to let me access his memory files or emotional logs for it." Because he didn't want Rock to see and experience that.

Phantom hummed as he nodded. "Crying can be for good reasons as well as bad, though the usual good ones are either relief or joy."

X nodded at that. "Not everyone will have that…strong a display at relief, but yes, we can end up crying like that if there's an overload to our emotional matrices." Not that X could cry, but he wasn't going to bring that up with his brother.

Rock nodded slowly, looking over the occupants in the room. Confusion flitted across his features again and he initiated a deeper scan on all three occupants. X's systems responded to it, sort of like it answered the door and told Rock's systems what he needed to know. For the other two? There was no response and he could only read surface data. X had his turned off earlier, so maybe they did theirs, too? "Why don't you two allow linking?" His gaze flickered between Phantom and Zero: they were friends enough to allow some level of access now, weren't they? Or was Blues' behavior enough for them to want to blacklist the two Robot Masters?

"Linking?" Zero asked. "I've got wireless access to the comm net, but Phantom won't have access codes for a while." He frowned. "And I can't sense you on the net at all. Are you logged on?"

"I am, but Blues said that we'd startle everyone if we made ourselves apparent, so I'm staying where he put me on the communications network. None of you…none of you feel like one of us, and I think he thought that with everyone so…since they don't trust us to begin with, I don't think he wanted to make it worse." Especially since Rock was certain that they wouldn't be expecting it. "When I was sad, he put me in a secure place where no one could touch me," and Rock was still there now. He was alone when Blues withdrew from the network to work on maintenance, but he made all kinds of fun security walls around Rock to give him something to play with on top of his 'homework' assignment. Rock was contentedly chewing through those, even now. And, of course, a little while after Rock left with X, Shadow came online, not that he'd come out to talk to anyone other than Rock and Blues. Rock could tell by Shadow's status that he was _working_ right now, so it'd be for the best to not mention him.

Rock wasn't so sure they'd take so kindly to one of Doctor Wily's Robot Masters, even if Zero was here.

Zero shrugged a bit. "I guess if you made yourself apparent on the net, I'd be able to link that way, but if we're in the same room, there's really no need because the comm net is really just for communications within the base. That aside, I doubt Blues would be too happy if you did let yourself visibly access the net." It was said with no small degree of shock, however, as Zero realized that the two Robot Masters were effectively—_very effectively_—cloaking their presence on the net. "Speaking of which, X, is it safe for them to be on the net like that? I'm surprised security hasn't booted them because of the inherent risk of an unregistered access."

"They're…not on the net the same way," X explained, trying to keep his answer from giving too much away. "And I don't mind. They're more equipped to handle the network, being what they are and how they operate." It bothered him that both of his siblings had simply waltzed past defensive systems that made Neo Arcadia's current setup pale in comparison, but at least he'd be able to talk to them later on to figure out how to recalibrate the net to consider non-Reploid access.

"I don't think they _can_ boot us," Rock said thoughtfully, tilting his head, "but we're not doing anything bad." So it didn't matter. "But I didn't mean the network. I meant linking the normal way. Or…" Rock paused again, looking between the three units in the room. "Wait, X, I can link to you some, but that was because of the array you have active, isn't it? Why aren't yours on?" He looked to Zero and Phantom then, a bit confused.

X tilted his head, frowning. "Wait…"

"Array?"

Phantom, too, turned to his father, noticing something off about the elf's eyes. "Father, what is he talking about?"

"Oh," X said, realizing what Rock had been talking about, the visor dropping over his eyes as he reoriented the defense program's display. "This?"

Zero and Phantom both looked at X with matching expressions of confusion.

Rock brightened, nodding emphatically as the visor dropped over X's eyes. "Yes! That. Why aren't theirs enabled?" They could link if they were, and then they could talk to Rock even better than they were right now. Blues and Shadow were both monitoring him _very_ closely as of the moment, but Rock hardly noticed.

Shadow considered telling Rock to shush about the network and their abilities on it: he was still in a situation that could turn volatile regardless of how X felt—that security officer was proof enough—but the child happily changed subjects on his own, instead bringing up the prospect of linking.

To _Zero_? Shadow didn't need to feel Blues' massive disapproval of the idea to have a mental reaction of 'Hell no!', to have that feeling reverberate over their links. Rock did the equivalent of stopping short in his tracks, blinking up at the two adult units in confusion even though his physical body didn't reflect any of that. What did Rock mean, '_Why not_?'

Shadow almost began preparing himself for blocking the link and inevitably upsetting Rock, but Blues pointed out that neither unit could link that way anyway, so it was a moot point.

It occurred to Shadow that he was failing as a babysitter if he had to keep bothering the charge's Master for data.

Phantom's expression didn't change. "Where did you_ get_ that?" he asked.

"Defensive security program from Blues," X said. "Since being a Cyber Elf requires that I upload _myself_ onto the network to access it. It's just a means of keeping me safe on hostile systems," or against other units that operated like Robot Masters.

"It lets X link to us, too! Not as much as I can link to Blues or one of the others, but a lot more than he could do without it," which was the aspect Rock was excited about. He liked being able to talk to X and he sent a very excited, happy-child type feeling over his link with the android.

Wait, seriously? Shadow was shocked. Those two Reploids hadn't noticed that array? It even gave a visual cue when it was activated, in one of X's eyes! It made Shadow wonder if they'd noticed had X come waltzing in with that very Proto Man-esque visor. He wondered if that was intentional on X's part: he knew there was no way Blues programmed it to behave that way.

Another thing that was confusing him was Zero's body. It wasn't the one he was created in and had he not been assured that, yes, this is the Zero unit, Shadow would have thought the unit to be a copy of Zero. Wily had been going for a majestic, intimidating sort of android. This? This unit looked young and was behaving more like a human teenager than a harbinger of destruction.

What _happened_ while they were all shut down?

Phantom's eyes had gone wide, though the gaze was one of fear, when he realized exactly what X had meant about protecting himself on hostile network systems. "Are you _insane_?" he blurted out. "You only just _started_ using that? How many times have you been on Neo Arcadia's systems in the last four years?" Didn't he realize what the security programs would have _done_ to him if he'd not been able to access his administrative rights? Or worse, if Copy X had found him on the net?

"Several times over, though not for all four of those years," X said, though he moved over to the pod, resting a hand against Phantom's bound hands. "I had to be, just to ensure my body was still safe, and…" He stopped.

"And what?"

X sighed, smirked a little, then turned to Zero, a strange glint in his eyes. "Remember how I always told you that I regretted losing track of where they'd moved Zero?"

Phantom nodded. "Something about the team that sealed him saying that security concerns necessitated the location not be documented. Yes, Father." What did that have to do with anything?

"When we were building Sanctum Yggdrasil's seal, when we engineered Dark Elf's prison…" X blinked at the memory, "You should remember how secretive I was during the entire process, how quiet we kept everything. Anyway, during the final stages of the process, once we'd built the cage in Sanctum Yggdrasil, we realized that we couldn't safely wire it into Sub Arcadia without risking a security breach or, worse still, the problems with the power plant affecting the strength of the seals on Dark Elf. So I told the team I'd figure something out. In the end, I suggested a stand-alone geothermal turbine, built and maintained beneath Sub Arcadia. Enough to keep the cage active without tapping into an already-damaged system and secured from external tampering as best we could manage."

"What does that have to do with Master Zero?" Phantom asked.

"When we were looking for probable locations to construct the turbine and how we could feasibly link it into Yggdrasil without raising notice," and X looked to Zero, "I stumbled onto the lab where you'd been sealed away. Without telling anyone what I was doing, I built a relay into the power system for Yggdrasil. I could only reasonably redirect a percentage of the output without risking your safety further, but I did what I could. The systems in your lab were already failing. It was a miracle in and of itself that you'd maintained an operational charge for all those years. So, I did what I could to ensure that you'd survive a little longer."

Zero looked up at X, wondering at the look he was being given. "If you knew, knew then, where I was…?"

Why had it taken four years for them to rescue him?

And they'd lost Rock again, though he was sitting quietly and listening like a good kid, even if he had no idea what they were talking about. Dark Elf? That was that good thing that got corrupted, right? Seal? They lost Zero? What? He looked between the three Reploids with wide eyes, hoping they'd provide more data so he could piece this puzzle together.

"What do you mean by you lost track? What security concerns?" What was he still missing?

"I can tell from the conversation we walked in on that you remember Omega," X said. "Do you remember what he was?"

Zero nodded, though his countenance darkened a bit. "Weil's so-called God of Destruction." Zero blinked as a new memory file repaired and opened. "Given the name 'Omega' by Weil because the cure for the Maverick Virus had been derived from the Omega Protocol program they found in my systems. Also because Omega wasn't the giant suit of armor that we fought in the final battle." Zero's eyes turned to the ground, darting around as the image files came to mind at his request. "The true Omega was my original body, Dark Elf's master controller and the pilot of the Harbinger mech."

When Shadow was concealed in shadows, there were no solid surfaces for him to interact with, except whatever he brought with him. Because of this, there was a terrible lack of walls for him to slam his head into. The…they found the Omega Protocol and claimed it was the key to _curing_ the virus?

Humans. Completely unable to see what was _right in front of them_. As always.

Rock picked up on Shadow's frustration and quickly pieced together that it had something to do with Zero, something to do with the protocol, except Shadow was refusing to answer his queries, so, "…What's the Omega Protocol?"

Zero shrugged, as if the answer was nothing serious. "The Omega Protocol was a portion of my programming code connected to my immunity to the Maverick Virus. Not sure _how_, but…" He frowned. "Wait a minute. The cure for the virus was the Mother Elf, was based off of my information." Blinking, the blonde looked at X. "Dark Elf is my _daughter_?"

The Cyber Elf looked like someone had kicked him, and it took a moment before he nodded. "She is."

"What does any of this have to do with you losing track of Zero?" Phantom asked. "I'm sorry if I'm not drawing the connecting lines here, but…" really, they weren't giving him the proper contextual data.

X waved his hand. "After the Elf Wars had ended, Zero was asked to undergo a full-spectrum analysis and diagnostic. Since the information stored in the processor in this body," he said, motioning to Zero, "was a direct copy from the body Omega had, they wanted to make sure that Zero wasn't at risk of becoming like Omega. It was supposed to just be precautionary. It wasn't until a decade or so after they'd stopped providing me with updates on their work that I finally decided to visit the lab where they'd been holding Zero."

"And?" Phantom and Zero asked.

"It was abandoned. Had been long before the Elf Wars had ended." X shook his head. "They lied to me, to us, about the reason for the request that you be resealed. They had no intentions of taking care of you. They saw you as a threat equal to Omega, if not greater, and locked you away somewhere so that you'd slowly burn out your reserve energy in hibernation and then initiate full shutdown procedures. As I said, that your systems managed to hold out for decades was…likely unexpected by the team that did that in the first place. I was, and still am, relieved for that oversight."

A shutdown such as the one Zero would have been subjected to was a death sentence for any of their kind.

They'd been studying Zero, studying his raw coding for decades and they hadn't connected that Zero's supposed 'immunity' to the virus wasn't an immunity _at all_? Shadow couldn't imagine how that could have been missed. It clearly wasn't for lack of searching. How. Shadow wasn't a unit whose focus was on programming and _he_ could look at Zero's code and understand what was written on the wall.

Rock's eyes were round, his gaze unfocused as he scanned his own memory files, several of his own unlocking and popping to the front of the queue. It was…a late war. The ninth war? He'd been so, so sick of it by then. And his siblings, his brothers and his sister, and they were…Rock's shoulders trembled. They'd done the same to Zero, hadn't they? Because they thought he might be in the way? Why…why did they do that? Who gave them the right to decide that? Rock curled in on himself a little bit, trying to deal with not just the memories, but the sudden flood of emotional scarring. How sick of it he'd been, sick with grief, maddeningly sick, and yet it kept going on, like a twisted nightmare except this was his _life_ and…

And now, it was being done to other people?

All three of them noticed Rock's sudden change in behavior, but with X as he was and Phantom connected to the charger pod, Zero was the one that moved, getting up from his chair and sliding onto the bed next to Rock. He was hesitant at first, as if expecting Blues to jump out of the shadows and blast his head off—and that reminded Zero that he needed to ask X about _that_ memory file—but he quickly drew the robot into his arms, a little shocked by his weight, as he pulled Rock onto his lap, holding him close.

What was it with today that he was the shoulder people needed to cry on?

"Shh," he whispered, rocking a bit on the bed, trying to calm Rock as he pressed the young robot's head against his shoulder. He had no idea what had made Rock so upset—he and Rock weren't close enough, didn't even know each other well enough, that X's story should have had such a profound impact. Zero sighed, holding the unit closer, realizing that, just as he had stumbled onto information in damaged memory databanks, something may have also unlocked for Rock.

"It's okay, Rock," Zero said, one hand rubbing Rock's back, trying to comfort him as best he could. "I…I don't know what's wrong, but it's okay. You're here, you're safe, and you're with family. It's…hard, I know, to find out things like this, but…" He stopped for a moment, then opted to simply hold the child close.

X reached out, felt his brother over their link, and strengthened the connection, fortified their bond, and he tried as best he could to pour feelings of comfort and support over their connection. They had _all_ had difficult lives, X knew, even if he didn't know what had been going on in Rock's.

Part of him was thankful that Zero had moved to embrace the child. No one else would have, and it would have been devastating had Blues had to come retrieve him.

Rock curled into Zero's chest immediately, behaving much like a child that just woke from a horrifying nightmare as his shoulders began to shake harder, his body trembling as he tried to get a hold of himself, and he grabbed at X almost desperately over the link, all fear and panic at his memories. "They…" Rock couldn't even grab at one single thing that was upsetting him. Nine times? And there was a tenth. After this, there was a _tenth_? And what came after? "He took them, too," and because of that, because of that people were…because of that they were…

"Who took whom?" Zero asked, only tightening his hold on Rock. "Rock, shh," he said, rocking softly to try and soothe the robot. "Something from your damaged files restored, didn't it?"

Rock's thoughts were scattered, his panic making his body tremble as Shadow was reaching to him via link, solidifying them a bit without pushing too far, reassuring Rock that no matter how immediate this felt right now, it was over and done with. He didn't need to be afraid.

"They…they wanted to _help_ people, that's what they were built for and instead…and then he took them all, he won't leave us alone and we just…" Rock shook again, trying to quiet himself, his mind providing him with an onslaught of data, files and profiles, memory files and statistics, all crowding his processors. They just wanted to be of use, they just wanted to help, just wanted to make people happy. So why did he undermine all of their efforts at every turn? "He always comes back, he makes them fight, and I never wanted to hurt them, but they wouldn't…" They wouldn't stand down. Not one stood down.

_His own war memories_, Zero realized, though he couldn't even begin to fathom who or what Rock was talking about when Rock had said that 'he' made them fight. Spinning Rock's words around in his head, another memory file restored, and Zero fell silent for a moment as he saw X standing, hands pressed against the window overlooking a city, his blue armor cast aside in a disorganized heap on the floor. Shaking his head, he closed the file, set it aside to look at later, and continued to try and comfort Rock. "It's alright, Rock. I…No one ever wants to fight. No one would choose it if there were other options." To be forced to fight? It was like the Maverick Virus all over again, but this had been before…

"We…" Zero stopped for a moment, considered his words, and nuzzled against Rock's head, into his hair. "When your brother and I worked together during the Maverick Wars, he never wanted to fight. He hated it," still hated it as far as Zero knew, "but…but if we hadn't fought, hadn't done what we could to protect the world, protect those that mattered to us? I…I don't know what your wars were like, what happened in your era, but with ours, the virus did…terrible things. It made people we called friends into machines of war. We tried, so hard, to save them, to help them. Some of them we could. The others?" Zero held the trembling body close. "We stopped those that we couldn't save because we knew, under the sickness, under all of what was wrong, they wouldn't have truly wanted to fight. They were _all_ good people," every last one of them. "We did what we could, fought when we had to, because we knew they weren't the people we knew, weren't right anymore…" Another memory file, and he looked to X for a moment. "We knew that, had they a voice to speak with, they would have wanted us to stop them because they never wanted to hurt anyone."

"They would…a lot of them told me they didn't want to fight, but they didn't have a choice." Rock's voice was a bit steadier now, a bit less panicked, though it was still muffled from him hiding his face in Zero's vest, much like what he'd done with Blues' scarf when X frightened him earlier that day. "They…their eyes were so _sad_, but there was no other way. They said, 'I'm sorry, brother, but I cannot let you continue.' And then they readied their weapons. The first six, then later, the littler ones, all eight of them. He took them all and there was nothing they could do, they couldn't resist his reprogramming." Rock's voice broke there, a half-sob escaping him before he clamped his jaw shut, trying desperately to get his systems back under some semblance of control.

Zero held Rock, falling silent. To know they had suffered through such similar horrors was an honest shock to his systems. "It wasn't reprogramming for ours," Zero explained softly, "because we can't be, but…" and he was a little confused to know that the older generation had _that_ weakness. "Were you able to undo the reprogramming?" Zero asked. "Once you stopped them, were you able to fix them?"

"They…Doctor Light could remove the changes imposed on their systems, but it…it's not something we can be immune to," that much Rock was certain of, "though there were units that were…lost." Rock trembled again. "I had to try and take them down, bring them offline without killing them. I had to offline them before they could offline_ me_," because then Rock would have been taken to be reprogrammed. "But even if Doctor Light took the changes away, they still remembered, still remembered the feeling of…of your own programming overriding you, overriding everything, making you do these things, making you kill _thousands_ of people, making your robots_ help_…" Rock took a shaky breath, as though the idea of making the robots help, too, was positively nauseating for him.

"You keep saying 'I'," Zero noted. "With the Hunters, there were always two on a mission at the bare minimum." He hugged Rock, though one hand had tangled into his hair, rubbing his scalp. "You had to go through that _alone_?" Zero couldn't imagine what it would have been like. Even if he and X did split up during the missions, they remained in radio contact. They were there to support each other. To have fought alone?

No wonder Rock was so traumatized.

"Blues would appear sometimes, but almost always for…for training," though Rock was clearly using that word as a loose definition, "but…sometimes, if the attack was close to home, the First Numbers would help, too, but they…the government wouldn't let them go out and help. There was…I…" Rock trailed off, honestly unable to recall way. Laws? They weren't allowed to fight. "They couldn't do as much, weren't as free to help…" even though they wanted to. They didn't like that Rock went alone. "In the end, I was the one sent, every time. I was the only one that _could_ go," the only one authorized.

Zero didn't know what to say, didn't have anything he could say, so he opted to simply hold the robot close, hope that X or Phantom could think of something to calm him, to comfort him.

X had to resist the urge to shake his head. It was like seeing himself from a different perspective. When it had come to the virus, he and Zero had been the only two truly immune units for so long, the only ones that could go into areas where the viral concentrations had been too high, where it had been too risky for other units to go in. For them, though, it had been a matter of safety, of keeping the other Hunters from ending up infected, from being Maverick.

X pulsed more energy towards Rock, trying to comfort him, trying to understand what it was for him to be the only one permitted, the only one the world would let be their hero…and to have to raise arms against actual _family_.

He'd only raised his buster against Zero once, when they'd discovered _why_ the blonde was immune.

Phantom looked to his father for a moment before his hands, still caught in the metal cuffs, moved up and over his head, reaching for the charger cable plugged into his secondary port. Pulling the wire free, he let the sheet drop to the floor, kicking it aside as he moved for the bed. Sitting down next to Zero, he nuzzled up to him and Rock.

Zero let go of Rock for only a moment, allowing Phantom room to pass his shackled hands over Rock's head, wrap his arms as best he could around the little robot, before Zero resumed the hug, holding both of the units tightly.

X pushed his energy outward, touched Rock through the link as his halo slid to red, a warm energy cocooning around the trio as he floated closer. Not quite healing them in the physical sense, it was still like being wrapped in a blanket, protected by a security net.

The elf wished he could have done more.

Rock responded to X via the link, but not with words. He pulled X toward himself over the link, curled up around him, his energy trembling but stabilizing some, especially now that he could cuddle into both Zero and Phantom. The warm energy that X was exuding was filled with good intention, of the intent to comfort, to fix, to heal. Rock wove his grateful feelings into his link with X, but leaned into Phantom when he hugged him, even if it was a little awkward with the handcuffs. Were they really necessary? It took a few minutes, but the child quieted and, slowly, the tremors shaking his frame ceased. His stress levels were still elevated, but he wasn't panicking any more, wasn't crying any more. Blues was doing the equivalent of running his hand along Rock's back over their link, though Rock told him repeatedly no, please, don't interrupt your maintenance cycle, really, I'm okay, no one's hurting me, I'm fine.

It was only because Rock was so certain that Blues remained as he was.

"For what it's worth," Zero whispered softly, still holding onto Rock and Phantom, still embraced within the odd calming warmth X was weaving around them, "I'm sorry if we upset you. I…I know the past can hurt, can be something…you don't want to remember, but you have people here, now, that care about you." He hugged Rock a little tighter. "And we're all willing to listen if you need to talk."

Rock nodded slowly, but, "My memories are…really fragmented. I…even if I did try to explain what I saw, its…in pieces. I don't think it'd make any sense if you weren't there," and they didn't know any of these people, didn't know the time, didn't know what was happening, why things were the way they were. And Rock was in no condition to explain. "But thank you." It really was reassuring to be told that and know it was true.

Phantom nuzzled into Rock's hair, pulling his arms close since he couldn't hug his uncle proper. "You're welcome," he said. "That's what family's for, after all."

Rock's recently recovered memory set not only filled out a lot of the missing profile images in Rock's database, but also reminded him that yes, he did have a concept of family once. Rock didn't fault Blues for not explaining it; he really hadn't had time to and the framework Blues was working from was the result of a…vastly different experiential data set. Rock still couldn't remember all of the intricacies and he knew that even if he did have the concept, it wasn't the same as the human version. Borrowed words again? Either way, the end result was the same.

Rock nuzzled Phantom in return, his head a little bit clearer now. Rock fully agreed with Phantom: that _is_ what family is for.

A link that was never closed flared back to life with X, a sort of groggy feeling to the energy, as though working through a haze, as though distracted. There were no actual words, as if that was even too much effort, but there were definite feelings there, definite emotion, along with that music. A feeling of approbation and some degree of gratitude: he'd done a good job of looking after Rock. Then a beckon or a pull on Rock's energy, through X's line. He wanted the child back; it was getting late. There were other emotions there, too, other thoughts communicated by feeling, rapid-fired as though it was a look into one of Blues' trains of thoughts. The sensation was gentle, though, like a whisper or a careful nudge. Nothing too urgent despite the commanding feeling Blues tended to carry. He was being careful so as not to overwhelm X with this input; he knew it had to be something novel to the android.

X nodded, physically, before pulling a bit on his connection with Rock. Standing, his energy began to flow into each of the three forms huddled on the bed, and he reached for Rock's hand. "We need to get you back to Blues," he said softly, even as Zero and Phantom held Rock close. "It's getting late and everyone needs to sleep, to charge for the night." '_And I'm sure you've got a homework assignment of your own,_' he said to Rock over the link, smiling. '_Rocinolle can't be the only one Blues gave work to._'

Phantom looked up, ebony eyes turned to his father for a moment, wanting to say no, wanting to say that Rock could stay with them, but he nodded, carefully untangling himself from the cuddle and scooting over on the bed. He'd have to wait for Zero to get plugged back into the pod, but at least this time, he'd be going into hibernation and actually settling in for the night.

Zero held Rock for a moment longer, brushing a hand over the robot's hair, before nudging Rock to his feet. "Take care, and good night."

Rock nodded and carefully got to his feet, almost going into a behavioral routine where he stretched, but vetoed it. Rock felt the beckon from Blues as well, felt the pull in the deepest part of his systems, his programming, directing him to come back to charge and rest while he worked on his 'homework'. Rock smiled slightly at X's observation. '_He told me to begin working on recovering my memory files._' Rock turned back to look to Zero and Phantom, his hand in X's now as he smiled softly and said to them, "Good night."

Zero helped Phantom to his feet, plugging him back into the pod and wrapping the sheet around him fully. The blonde smiled at X as the young Guardian's eyes drifted shut, falling into hibernation stasis as the pod's lid slid down and clicked into place. "If you have a minute," he said softly, "after you drop him off…"

"I'll be back," X said. "Come on, Rock. Let's get you back to Blues." Heading for the door, he waiting for it to open, Anna and Raul on their feet and tagging alongside Rock as they moved for the room down the hall. "Will you be able to get the door open again?" X asked.

Rock nodded, eyes brightening. "The lock is a game," he said as they approached the door. "He won't set it so that I can't get in, but you have to play the game to get through. I've been working on it in one of my processors, but since Phantom was looking sleepy, when I got close again, I put it on hold so I could get in quickly now." Which was allowed in the rules for this game. And honestly, Blues would open the door regardless: he called Rock back. Thank you, though, for showing me around the base." Rock had fun, even if that memory cluster upset him. That wasn't X's fault, wasn't anyone's fault, though.

X laughed softly. "I couldn't even touch the lock program, and you call it a game," he said, shaking his head. "You and I should sit down in the near future so I can learn where I'm going so wrong with the things Blues was trying to teach me." He leaned over, echoed a pulse through his body to hold his form, and hugged his older brother. "I'll stop by tomorrow. I'll make sure that once I'm back from Cyberspace, from where I have to go to charge, that I'll turn my defense program back online so you can link to me and let me know when I can stop by. And…if Blues wakes…if he finishes his defragging before I get there, let him know I'm coming by to apologize."

"I will," Rock said as his head bobbed again. They came to the door and it took a few moments, but then Rock smiled and the door slid open. Blues was lying in the same position they left him in, looking completely dead to the world, but Rock bounded up to the bed and pounced him, his aura prickling and sparking with childlike excitement, excitement for having gone out, and excitement for having come home.

Blues didn't fully wake, didn't startle despite how rambunctious Rock was being, but he did hook Rock around the waist with the arm that wasn't covering his eyes and pull him down onto the bed, forcing the child to be still. Blues reached out to X a second time, without words again, but that left an impression, thanks for delivering Rock (although there was some irritation under there, but directed at Rock for that pounce), and then Blues sort of pulled X's aura further into the link, guiding him and prompting him into an automated query. It returned with a basic status reading for Blues, along with the estimated time until completion: another six hours. So if X ever wanted to know, that was how.

Blues withdrew back into himself after that, his hand coming to a rest on Rock's back as the child was fiddling with a cord in his hands (where had he gotten it from?), already having one end plugged into his own port. He was reaching around Blues to plug the other end in, trying not to jostle the elder robot despite how excited he was. It wasn't really working. "I can charge off of him," which was comfier than the pod in Rock's opinion, "but he'll be defragging for an hour or two longer than my charge. So when you finish your charge, I'll be up." Rock smiled up at X again.

X passed a soft '_thank you_' along the connection with Blues before smiling at Rock. "I'll see you both later," he said, heading out the door. His hands idly passed over the Garm's heads as he left, surprised to see them sitting near the doorway like guard dogs.

As the door slid shut, he rested a hand against his eyes, his form fragmenting a bit before stabilizing, a deep breath taken to calm the emotional programming that had fluttered and disrupted his concentration.

Even with Phantom in hibernation, it was probably better for X to talk to Zero in the room the blonde had set aside for him.


	18. Playing Games

_Blues is finishing up systems maintenance while Rock and X are spending some time bonding and getting to know each other's worlds a little better. Zero is busy pondering his past and trying to piece together what he can while Shadow tries to make sense of the world he's woken up in. Life moves on for those in the Resistance base, and the eldest creation of Light discovers that something else from his era has survived._

_**Disclaimer: **Mega Man and all related characters and information are the property of Capcom Co., Ltd., Akira Kitamura and Keiji Inafune._

* * *

><p>X stepped up to the door, hesitated, and then walked through.<p>

Zero jumped a bit, not expecting X to just walk right in as he did, but he remained silent as X motioned for him to leave the room. Stepping out as the door opened, he brushed against its security signal, locking it behind him. "When I said that I'd talk to you when you had a minute," he said softly, grinning cheekily, "I didn't mean for you to come _right_ back."

"Well, you're not set up in a pod for tonight, and it's not like it was going to take me that long to drop Rock off. Besides, you looked like you really needed to talk about something."

"I do, but why leave the room? I mean, yeah, sure, I locked the door as a precaution because not everyone here approves of Phantom, but…"

"I figured it would be something you didn't necessarily want to say within earshot of Phantom, hibernating or not. That," and X gave Zero a pointed look, "and I have to figure out some way to make use of my room."

Another grin. "Told you I was getting you one. I thought you'd appreciate having one on the same level as the rest of us." He shrugged. "I hope I didn't offend."

"No, not really," X replied. "Although I told you I wasn't too keen on the idea because we may need the room for others that have physical bodies. I'm not going to argue, though, by this point. Rock and Blues would have a field day if I tried to have the room assignment removed, especially since I had Rock check the fob." X reached out, touched the door's system, and walked in, Zero in tow. "Your memories seem to be restoring at a decent rate," X noted as Zero dropped onto the bed.

Zero splayed out on the mattress, blonde locks cast out haphazardly around him. "They're coming back all kinds of sporadic, though. Most of them are what I figure to be Elf War files, but some of them are older. A lot of the Maverick Hunter SOP, a few random fights." He looked to X. "The ones with you leave me really wondering what you're not telling me though."

"What do you mean?"

"Some of the files I have from before the Elf Wars, the ones where I'm still in Omega's body instead of this one…" Zero drifted for a moment. "When I surprised your brother the other day, the day he drew the buster on me, it repaired a memory file where…where _you_ had drawn your buster on _me_ as if I'd done something…wrong." Zero looked to X. "What am I not remembering about that fight?"

X could not have picked a worse memory file to repair out of the decades of history locked in those damaged files, at least with his memories as fractured as they were. To tell Zero what had really occurred would only affect him negatively. To tell him that he wasn't actually _immune_ to the virus insomuch as he was able to use the modified version of it as the source point? Zero didn't need that weighing down on his mind. "There had been…a massive viral outbreak," X said, carefully wording his admission, "and you had been near the point of origin. It's how we realized the virus couldn't affect you like all the others. I'd been sent in to retrieve you and get you back to the Hunter's medical teams for evaluation."

"You make it sound as if I went Maverick."

X simply stared in silence.

"But…I'm immune."

"Yes, you are. We were just trying to make sure," that you weren't going to get stuck as a rampaging killing machine, "that you were okay. We'd never really exposed an immune unit to that high a concentration of virus energy. You had been…piloting a shuttle that was meant to destroy a falling orbital colony. The colony had…had been infected. It was being used as a bomb, and while you had been able to destroy it, been able to minimize the collateral damage, you still suffered" a flooding of the Maverick Virus "ridiculously high levels of exposure."

"You…I…" Zero stopped. "I'm going to have to wait for all the satellite files to repair. Seeing that, just the moment where you demanded I go back, when you raised your buster because I refused…"

X smirked. "You hated the medical officers, the medical wing, back then."

"I don't see why I would."

"Different world, different life," X said with a shrug. "Any other files that really caught your attention?"

"Just the fight with Omega: seeing the Harbinger mech split open at the start of the fight and Omega…taunting me, telling me that I was just a worthless copy that couldn't stop the change he was initiating for Weil."

"I remember that, too. You'd…you'd almost dropped your saber because you recognized the body as your own back then," even if he couldn't remember it as well now. "Omega was an odd machine in that he only talked when the mech was open, when he could see us. The rest…"

"The rest was that 'sound that reverberated against the buildings' bit from Phantom's bedtime story." Zero shuddered. "Speaking of all of that, though, where was Axl? I remember he was the third immune we'd found, the…the…" The blonde grasped for the word, the term that had been used, though the ability was clear enough in his mind. "He had that ability to mimic the physical characteristics of other units."

"The A-Trans," X supplied, "yes. He was supposedly the prototype of the copy-capables. He'd…fallen to Omega's forces some time before the last battle." And X had no intentions of recounting the spectacularly horrid way that the young gunner had met his end.

"The Elf Wars are why I don't recognize the faces around here, isn't it?"

"What do you mean?"

Zero shrugged a bit, pushing himself up to sit on the bed. "The hundred years in that pod beneath the city aside, no one from our time, from the Maverick Hunters…none of them survived."

X sighed as he hung his head, shaking it. "Some of them, yes, within Neo Arcadia or the floater colonies, but those closest to us?" X shook his head again. "The Elf Wars were by far the worst four years of our lives."

"Four?" Zero squeaked. "Something told me it was longer than that."

"No, and that's part of what made them so bad for everyone involved. What this world became, what it looks like now, is the fallout from four short years against Omega and Weil's forces, against legions of Reploids controlled and manipulated by their partner Elves."

"So we stopped Omega, destroyed him. What of Weil and my daughter?"

"Weil was tried and convicted of capital crimes against humanity and Reploids, but…" X winced a bit. "The people that found him guilty, that clamored for him to be made to suffer for his crimes, chose a life sentence instead of the death penalty." Although, honestly, X had thought executing the scientist would have been for the better. "He was provided with a mechanical suit that would repair his body of any damage accrued, force him to live forever because it wouldn't _let_ him die, and then exiled to wander the wasteland of the planet. If he ever returns to Neo Arcadia, the city patrols are under orders to execute on sight." There were ways around the machine's restoration system. "Omega's remains were stored in a rocket and launched into deep space to prevent him from presenting a risk to anyone or being accessible to Weil. The Dark Elf escaped until about four years ago and has since been caged in the heart of the city until we can figure out exactly what Weil did to her. If we can reverse that damage, restore her to the way she used to be—"

"_When_ we restore her," Zero corrected. "Not if. Not with my daughter."

X nodded. "When we are able to undo what was done…" X hesitated. "It'd be the end of all those problems, the chance we need to start fixing this world, really dedicate ourselves to that purpose. There are Mavericks out there, true Mavericks still under the control of elves driven mad by Dark Elf's influence, so there's still that risk outside of the Eden Dome right now."

"And this power issue with the city as it is?"

"That's the reason Ciel's been working on studying Energen Crystals and how the Cyber Elves are able to use them. She's trying to develop a means of combining the potential energy capabilities of the crystals with the existing power plant to help correct whatever is going wrong with the plant's system." X smiled as he dropped into a hover next to the bed. "I'm so glad to hear that you're recovering your memories, though, all this hellishness aside."

Zero smirked, leaned towards X. "It'll just take time, X. All of this. But we'll see it through together."

X was thankful that one of them could still be optimistic after all of this.

* * *

><p>Rock was still anxious, still a bit antsy, but Blues strengthened their link, reinforced their bond, and poured soothing feelings and reassurances through, let Rock be awash in calming influences. Rock cuddled down and relaxed, letting Blues go through his memory files, opening his mind so the elder Robot Master could see just what had him so upset.<p>

My. Of all the memories to repair…

Shadow materialized from the shadows given off by the desk, the Wilybot not looking at all like he'd just been woken from several centuries of hibernation. His armor and weapons were in good repair and his systems showed green all down the line. He stepped over to the bed, well aware that what Blues could do for Rock right now would be very limited, not unless he cut his maintenance short, so Shadow leaned over Rock and put a hand on the child's shoulder.

Even though Rock wasn't giving off physical signs of distress any longer, his systems were still in a flurry and, honestly, he felt like he may begin crying at any moment.

"None of them were destroyed. In the end, it was determined that their uprising was purely Wily-hakasei's fault," even though it was only _partially_ his fault, Shadow mused, "and the order was rescinded. They were all able to return to their duties because of your efforts," so Rock did a good job then, even if it seemed scary now. It'd certainly been scary for him then.

Rock nodded, listening to Shadow's argument to Rock's emotional reaction, let that be factored into his emotional state. It was more effective than Zero's argument because Shadow was able to address the events that were so upsetting. If it ended well, then there wasn't much reason to cry, was there?

Blues agreed with Shadow's sentiments, one arm still curled around Rock as the child began tugging at his scarf. Rock did still have his gloves, right? And no, he may not borrow the scarf. He'd arrange to have one made for Rock if he liked it that much.

Rock giggled, thinking he could dress up as Proto Man if this kept on. He'd just need the helmet, visor, and shield and he'd be good to go. He smiled all the wider when Blues' prickle of amusement translated in their link. He closed his eyes and began to focus on his memory files once again, no longer skittish about the idea of unlocking more and having that be something terrible, too.

Once Rock settled down, once he truly calmed, Shadow stepped back and shimmered from view, positioning himself to keep vigil while these two ran maintenance. He didn't think that they were in any real danger at the moment, Zero unit or no, but if there was even the slightest chance…

None of them would go down without a fight, never again.

* * *

><p>The next few hours passed quietly, with Rock contentedly working on his memory files. No new ones unlocked, but he did manage to do a lot of cleanup given the short span of time. Blues' aura exuded contentment. Aside from that minor upset, his maintenance wasn't being interrupted and, really, how often did <em>that<em> happen?

The Dark Men tended to make sure that it couldn't happen often at all: if he was given time to do maintenance, he'd be that much harder to take down.

Rock was working at the door lock still, but right now more of his attention was diverted toward the layers of security Blues had him wrapped in on the network. He'd gotten through four of them, but Blues added a few more before lying down and now Rock was a bit stuck on one part. That only engaged him more, made him more excited because yes, it was hard, and Rock's energy in the Harmony was resonating with his happiness at all of these toys that he'd been given to play with.

X stepped out of Cyberspace in his room—how odd it felt to call it that—giving himself a moment to reorient before activating his defense system.

The second X's defense system came online, he was immediately pounced upon by another presence. Rock felt X, recognized him immediately, and greeted the younger Lightbot exuberantly, his aura positively trembling with happiness and hello. Rock's contribution to the Harmony was far bouncier and more excited than the previous night, as though whatever had upset him was now nothing but a faded nightmare.

Rock was clearly a morning person. And most probably a noon and night person, too.

X laughed as he stepped through his door, heading down the hall for Blues and Rock's room, tethering to Rock and strengthening their link as he moved. '_Good morning,_' he sent, his voice cheery and bright, as if he'd slept well.

'_Morning_!' Rock's was a happy chirp, really, and by his feeling on the link, he was certain that today would be the Best Day Ever, at least until tomorrow came. '_I'm working on the lock, but I've almost got it._' He'd actually been holding it because he was anticipating X's arrival. Now there was a nice little wedge chewed out of the barriers Blues blanketed him in.

X's energy pushed out as he got close to the door, met against the soft pulse of Rock's. '_Can you show me?_' he asked. He really needed to learn, to see how his thought patterns truly differed from that of the Robot Masters. If he had a comparison, something simple like how he approached a lock system against how Rock approached it, he could apply that to all the future data line interactions he had with the Robot Masters.

Sparring with Blues included.

The lock sequence had changed, X noted, adding walls on top of walls on top of layers of encryptions. Were it not for the fact that Rock probably wouldn't understand the term, it really looked to X like a security system layer cake.

Rock didn't even blink. '_Sure!_' Rock thought that if X learned this game, then he could play it too. And if he could play, it'd be more fun that way. '_It's a lot harder now than it was when I first woke up—he's using it to see how much I can still do, I think—but since I nearly have it, what's left is pretty simple._' Rock paused a moment to make sure that X was watching, then began undoing the remaining encryptions. '_In this kind, the key to bringing down the firewalls is in the encryptions, so if you can get enough of those translated, it's much easier to get through the firewall._'

'_Hold on,_' X said, reaching out for Rock's 'hand' in order to stop his motions. '_To undo this lock, I have to bypass the security firewall?_' He reached out, read the data, considered it for a minute. '_Okay, go on._' He'd rather just watch this time. He didn't want to lock Rock in if he made a mistake and reset the system.

Rock blinked, almost like a hiccup over the link, then resumed his work on the lock. '_The firewall's not letting unauthorized anything open the door, so you have to either take it down or register yourself as someone okay to override. Really, whichever is faster. In this case, taking it down is faster._' Like dominos, the encryptions unfurled and fell before Rock and he collected the unencrypted data. '_And now see? We have this. This is the key to getting the firewalls down._' It was just a mess of seemingly random data, but Rock seemed satisfied with his results.

X blinked, wondering if his confusion was translating over their link in a way that explained to Rock that he had _no idea what just happened_. '_I'm lost,_' he admitted. The data that Rock had laid out before him made absolutely no sense. Even though X had a firm grasp on concepts such as advanced calculus, he saw what Rock did as providing him with the starting equation and the final answer without providing the proofs for his work.

Rock did the equivalent of looking at X over the link, then down at the data. Rock considered for a few moments, then 'looked' at the lock. X was lost? '_Where did I lose you?_' That'd be a good place to start to get X back on track.

"Pretty much at the start. I saw what data you were working with before, and I can see what you have now, but the process in between?" His single processor was _not_ equipped to keep up.

'_Oh,_' Rock said, considering it. He looked at the lock again for a few moments, then turned toward X on the link. '_It was too fast? I can show you the logs for what I did to unlock it, that'll help, right?_' It'd be a play-by-play of every move he made, so Rock hoped that it'd clear things up for X. He reached for the android through the link, a little like he was reaching with both arms to be picked up, and queried X for permission to give him some log files to view.

'_The logs will help, yes,_' at least in placing what Rock had actually done to have the security just crumble as it had in such a short time. '_I'm trying not to be a bother with learning this, but…I don't think, don't operate, in machine time. My processor speed is about equivalent, maybe a bit faster, than a human brains' synapse speed._' It was going to take him a lot longer to break down the lock than it had taken his brother. '_If you want to just wait for a later time,_' X said, his tone apologetic, '_since you're going to end up stuck in that room for a while trying to hold my hand through the process otherwise._'

'_I have a better idea,_' Rock said slowly, his voice still optimistic. '_If you've never done anything like this, you still have to learn it, so it takes longer. Why don't I set up a mock locking program that you can run to simulate breaking it? It won't be as hard as Blues', but until you get the hang of how to do it…_' That would help, right?

'_That'd be fine,_' X said. Despite Blues not being open to providing advice, to guiding X along, Rock was proving an adept teacher. '_Would it be a simulation program you'll put together for me to download?_' He honestly didn't expect Rock to put a second set of locks on the door, even if it was to help X learn how they worked.

'_I could give it to you to download, or…I could put it on your door since you don't have to open doors to go through them. Though that may not be a good idea if you had a guest…_' Rock trailed off, frowning slightly over the link.

'_I think I'd prefer the download for now. I want to get used to the program in a test setting before I move from there to actually cracking a full encryption._' X moved to the wall next to the door, resting against it, as he waited for Rock to either open the door and come out so that they could continue exploring the facility, or to say it was okay for him to come in, locked door or no.

He waved cheerily to Phantom and Zero as they left their room, Phantom's arms cuffed behind his back as they headed in the opposite direction. Zero had waved, and Phantom responded with a small nod of his head. X sighed as he dropped his arm; he couldn't wait until his son was allowed to move around the base on his own recognizance.

After a few moments, the door slid open, but Rock was still cuddled on the bed, even as he was slipping the cord from his own port. It was already disconnected from Blues and by the looks of it, the elder unit barely budged an inch. The arm that was curled loosely around Rock was the only part of Blues that really moved the entire time.

There was little doubt that even if Blues hadn't been physically responsive, the link the two Robot Masters shared had been going rapid-fire the entire time.

"If you give me maybe twenty minutes, I can put it together for you," Rock said, his voice sounding a little bit sleepy despite how cheery he'd been over the link. The child straightened and sat up, letting Blue's arm fall to the blankets. "Blues still has a couple hours to go before he finishes," so now X and Rock could play for a bit?

X smiled as he nodded. "If he's still defragging, maybe it'd be better for you and I to go elsewhere in the base?" he suggested.

Rock nodded, "Okay." Blues sent a feeling along his link with Rock that he'd be along once he completed what he was doing. Shadow would accompany him in the meantime. "Is there anything you had to do, though?" If that was the case, should Rock stay here until X finished doing important things? "You're in charge here, right?" Rock didn't want to get in the way.

"I am," X said, "but it's not as…high-maintenance a job as you might think. We're not setting up for any city raids for another week or so unless Neige tells Hirondelle that there's a new set of…" He stopped. "It's more supervisory than actually leading them at the moment, and, really, they're self-sufficient enough as a team that I don't need to stick my nose into everything." Unless there were messages waiting for him on the network, but really, that could wait. "Is there anywhere you'd like me to take you?"

Rock kind of wanted to go to the surface, but he knew he'd better wait until Blues got up for that. "We went where I wanted all last night. Is there anywhere you wanted to go?" Rock wanted to find out what kinds of things X liked doing, wanted to get to know him better. He couldn't do that if all they ever did was what Rock wanted.

X actually stopped moving at that, looking down at his brother. "I…don't really…" It was bad enough that he hadn't allowed himself to have a room; would it hurt Rock's feelings if X admitted that he really didn't offer himself time for hobbies and personal interests anymore either? "You sure there's nowhere you wanted to go?"

"You don't have anything fun you like to do?" Rock sounded like he was torn between being alarmed and being amazed. Really? Nothing? Rock would have tugged on X's arm had he a physical body. Instead, Rock fixed him with a particularly round-eyed gaze.

In his gaze, something akin to determination formed beneath the amazement and worry. Rock's newest project was to find out what X liked so X and Rock could play.

"Well…" If Blues wasn't up yet, he should probably say hi to Zero and Phantom. He knew that Blues wouldn't be happy spending a lot of time with them, so if they went now, Blues wouldn't have to. "Where are Zero and Phantom?"

"I'm not actually sure," X said. "Zero is probably stopping by Cerveau's lab to update what memory files restored and when or how, since Cerveau and Ciel are keeping such a close eye on his recovery process. Phantom's probably with him, all things considered, but our best bet would probably be going up to the fourth level and seeing if they're with Cerveau. If they're not there, I'll jump on the network, see if anyone has heard from Zero or if he's logged on."

Rock nodded and reached for X's hand again as he signaled the lift. Rock could feel that Zero was logged in, but after Rock brought up the desire to actually link to Zero and Phantom, both Blues and Shadow forbade him from doing so, at least for the time being. Blues' systems actually went into a state of alert at the thought and when Rock queried him for the logic chain, Blues said that, in this case, it would be in everyone's best interest for Rock just to follow his direction. "They were both really nice to me last night, so I want to thank them again."

X actually took up one of Rock's earlier offers, floating up to the fourth level as Rock rode the lift up, waiting for him to arrive and offering his hand to Rock once more. "That's very nice of you," he told his brother, "though, like Phantom said, it's what family is for, even if Zero isn't related to you. Most everyone here sees this as one big family, even if we are working as a revolutionary faction."

"Blues was happy, too," Rock added as he took X's offered hand. It was hard for Blues to trust anyone. Even Rock wasn't trusted when they first met. Blues had an almost fatalistic view of the world and, Rock thought, that that must be a lonely way to live.

"I think Blues is just…glad to know that he doesn't have to hover over you like a hawk or a mother bear protecting their cub." That his eldest brother had bad first impressions of both units hadn't helped any.

"…on that list was from…" Zero stopped, turning to face whoever had just walked into the lab. "Hey, X," he called, pushing himself from the exam table and over to the brothers. He ruffled Rock's hair. "How are you holding up, short stack?"

Rock blinked up at Zero, though he didn't mind his hair being ruffled. "Short stack?" Rock kind of agreed about Blues being happy about not having to hover, but in a sense, he still was, wasn't he? Rock wasn't truly alone with them, not with Shadow minding him. Not that Blues meant that as an insult to X.

Shadow was just as much there for X's protection, after all.

"Short stack. It's a nickname. A…" Zero worried his lip a little, brow furrowing. "Sort of like a code name, but it's given because it's endearing or means something to the unit that provided the nickname. If you'd prefer me not use that, I'll just call you Rock."

"You called Axl that, too, for a while," X related. "And a few of the newer members of the Zeroth early on."

"Because they were shorter than me or beneath my rank in the Hunters?"

"A little bit of both, I think."

Phantom kicked off the exam table he'd been on, the last whirrs of his leg armor sounding as he adjusted to the repairs and the new gears Cerveau had installed. His hands were held behind him still. "Master Zero, if you could, please?" he asked, walking over to the trio and turning his back.

Zero nodded, grabbing a small data stick from one pocket and swiping it over the handcuffs.

"Wait a minute," X said, realizing that Phantom had walked out of the room with his hands behind his back, though he'd been in the pod the night prior with them folded in front of him. "I thought the sec team didn't give you a fob."

"They didn't," Zero explained, pocketing the stick. "I fiddled with this after everyone left, figured out the lock mechanism for his set, and had him uncuffed while he was still in the room."

X blinked. Had Zero managed to rediscover his coding skills while repairing his memory drives?

"What?" Zero said, looking at X. "I got bored. Phantom had my pod, I wasn't tired, and it was something to do so I wasn't busy taking my saber apart for the umpteenth time."

"You're not upset, are you?" Phantom asked as he stretched his arms, double-checking his systems before taking the gauntlets from Cerveau and replacing them.

"I'm less worried about me seeing something bad in that and more about the rest of the Resistance."

"Nothing to worry about," Zero said, recuffing Phantom as soon as the armor was back in place. "Besides, his weapons are still locked up and I'll be serving as his bodyguard and whatnot. I figure why the hell not, since it's not like I've got all that much on my plate and helping with the stuff he's good at," Zero ticked his head toward Phantom, "means I find out more about the Resistance without half of them ogling me like I'm the greatest thing they've seen since…I don't know, a full container of Energen Crystals or something."

"Distract them from one point of attention by providing a more pressing second point," Phantom said, smiling as he turned back around. "Morning, uncle."

"Morning!" Rock chirped in reply, still holding X's hand as he looked back to Zero. "I don't mind the nickname," and he didn't think Blues would either, just so long as Zero didn't try to give Blues himself a new designation. "I think I…had one, once, but I don't really…" His brow furrowed. "It wasn't a name family called me, but…" But he couldn't remember.

"Aw, hell, I can't help it," Zero said, kneeling down in front of Rock and tucking his arms under the smaller units' shoulders. "Noticed you're a little on the heavy side last night," he said, smiling, "but I should still be able to get away with…" The blonde didn't bother finishing his sentence, pushing himself forward as he stood, getting some momentum going in order to actually pick Rock up, and he pivoted around once he'd gotten fully to his feet, spinning Rock in a few quick circles before slowing and resting the robot against the ground again. "You remind me a lot of the kids I used to hang around when I had a few minutes off-duty with the Hunters. They loved it when I did that, and I just couldn't resist the chance to do it again." And if the smile on Rock's face was any indication, he'd liked it too.

Rock was laughing, a big smile across his face: he_ liked _that game. He'd felt a moment of panic from both Shadow and Blues when Zero moved to pick Rock up, but both adults relaxed when it was clear that Zero wasn't going to hurt Rock. "It was fun," even if Rock didn't get dizzy the way a human child might. "Did you get more of your memories back?" Because now Zero was talking about the Hunters pretty freely.

"Bits and pieces, but it seems like most of the ones that are restoring during my maintenance cycles are avoiding the war memories directly. I'm getting more of the between memories, little stuff like hanging out with the kids or spending time with X and the other Hunters. I've gotten a few from what I think was the Jakob Project incident, but I can't really make heads or tails of those." He pushed himself to his feet, looking at Rock with a smile. "If you're heavy enough that I have to use momentum just to pick you up, I'm almost scared to ask how much your brother weighs."

"Am I that heavy?" Rock blinked as he considered it. "I do weigh more than a human child would, but…" The Reploids weren't as massive as the Robot Masters, then?"

"A little, yeah," Zero said. "Rough guess for you would be around a hundred or so kilos, but units like me and Phantom? We run, what, seventy to eighty kilos, standard?"

"For our heights, about seventy-two would be standard," Phantom said. "There's no way he's over a hundred, though. His height? He should only be about half that."

"Don't believe me?" Zero said, reaching for the key he'd made for Phantom's handcuffs. "Fine," he said as he pulled the cuffs away, "you try picking him up from a standstill."

Phantom shrugged. "Do you mind, uncle?"

"No, I don't mind," Rock said, looking up at Phantom a little curiously, even holding his arms out so that Phantom could pick him up.

Phantom locked his arms under Rock's, wrapping them around his torso as he knelt down to pick Rock up, and his eyes went wide as he pushed himself to his feet. He hadn't even managed to fully straighten his legs. "Wow," he said as he released Rock, moving back to Zero to have the handcuffs put back on. "Yeah," he said with a nod, "hundred kilos, easy."

Rock shifted his vest, straightening his clothing again as Phantom was restrained. "I didn't think I was that heavy. Blues can pick me up," without a problem. Rock didn't really feel bad; it had nothing to do with self-image for him. Though… "Your construction probably uses a lighter, stronger alloy than what was available when I was built, so that would make sense, right?"

"That's likely," X said. "Not to mention I didn't build you with specs for heavy lifting," X said, turning to Phantom. "That's more Fefnir's thing."

"Whether or not that's true," Phantom countered, "even Fef is going to be thrown off. Uncle Rock probably outweighs _him_ by at least ten kilos." And Fefnir had been built like a _tank_. "But I sincerely doubt that you've come here just for us to debate about weight classifications and differences between the DLN and AXR lines," Phantom said, dropping to one knee. "Can I get a hug?"

Did Phantom even need to ask? Rock stepped over to him and wrapped his arms around him, frowning slightly because his arms were still bound. How long did Phantom have to stay like that? He understood that Phantom was an enemy the day before and that they should be cautious, but…it didn't seem fair.

Shadow murmured to Rock over their link that even if it didn't seem fair, it was necessary. Phantom needed to prove to the people here that he was sincere, and talk was cheap. Rock should know that.

"So, what brings the two of you here anyway?"

"I wanted to thank the two of you again for last night," Rock said in a quieter tone, smiling slightly. He seemed a bit saddened by the memory still, but thinking of it wasn't upsetting him any longer.

"I'm just disappointed that we couldn't help more," Phantom said. "Seeing anyone cry, especially when we can't really piece together the reasons why, can be a bit upsetting. I'm sure you can understand."

"You really don't need to thank us, Rock," Zero said, leaning down and hugging him before ruffling his hair again. "We're friends here, some even family. To provide that support, that stability, is what good friends do."

Rock nodded to Zero as Cerveau approached the small grouping. He'd hung back, mostly observing and making mental notes about the smaller progenitor unit. While he was interested in how they were built, he knew that asking to do something so potentially invasive wouldn't be a good idea for the time being. Perhaps once they settled and became accustomed to not just the Resistance but the time period as a whole, he'd be able to ask. "I'm sorry to interrupt, but Master Zero, we do need to finish this log of your file recoveries for the past twenty-four hours." And the sooner they finished, the sooner Zero would be free to socialize and the sooner Cerveau would be free to move to his next task.

"Right," Zero said. "Sorry about that. If you'd like, X," Zero turned back to the elf for a moment, "we can catch up later, but there's a few things I need to take care of, and Hirondelle asked me to bring Phantom up to sec level to see if he had anything the team could use."

"That's fine," X said with a nod. "Get what you need to taken care of." As much as he liked Zero's company, there were better things for the saber master to be doing than tagging along with him.

"Have a good day," Phantom called as he hefted himself back onto the table near the one Zero had been on.

Rock waved to Phantom and Zero, then turned toward X, looking up at the Cyber Elf. "It's your turn to decide where to go," the child smiled up at him. Surely, in this entire base, there was _something_ X liked doing.

"I…really don't know where we could go that I could do anything," X admitted, his hands flexing beneath the immaterial fabric of his robes. "It's not…the same for me anymore."

"I…I'm sorry," Rock said, looking down. Rock hadn't really considered that. But X was on the network, wasn't he? Didn't he play any games there?

"Don't be sorry," X said, brushing his hand over Rock's shoulder. "It's no one's fault that I'm like this, and while it's a little difficult at times to work with the others here, I'm at least thankful that I'm alive and well, that I can help them in the effort against Copy X and everything that's become of my city." The look in his eyes, however, reminded X of Rock when he'd asked Blues to play soccer with him. "I'd ask if you knew any games to play, but that would require I load into one of the networks and I'm not sure Blues would take too kindly to me bothering you on the net."

Now Rock _really_ frowned up at X. "I told you, Blues _likes_ you." Didn't X understand what that meant? "He doesn't…he doesn't just _like_ people after knowing them for a week. He doesn't just trust anyone after knowing them for a week." And Blues had been displaying a lot of trust with X, especially while he was down for maintenance. "He doesn't think you'll hurt me."

"I didn't mean it like that," X countered. '_I meant that I know you and Blues are cloaking yourselves on the net, that you're keeping out of sight while being online. I don't want to interfere with that, especially knowing that Blues doesn't approve of people easily._' Really, it was better if a conversation like this continued via their link.

'_We don't have to play on the main part of the network and disrupt what everyone is doing,_' Rock pointed out. Hadn't Blues been cloaking X when X logged in just to train with him? Suddenly, their link undulated, a slow and dawning thing. Rock was smiling. '_Why don't we play with the lock program?_' He'd finished it only a few moments ago. That'd be fun, right?

X blinked. '_The only reason I was iffy about the net was because I thought Blues was the one managing the secure area you two are in. I wasn't sure if that'd interfere with his maintenance, even if he only has about an hour or so left._' He nodded. '_The lock program sounds like a plan,_' though the fact that Rock viewed something of that magnitude as a game spoke volumes of their differences. He really hoped that his confusion and slight disagreement about it being a 'game' didn't translate over the link.

'_If something like us logging in would disrupt him, he wouldn't be able to maintain the secured area while defragging to begin with,_' Rock told X with a feeling like a nod. '_We're not actually pushing through the security, only existing within it, so it's not a stressor on his systems. If you come online, I can move you over so he won't have to._' Rock's access wasn't nearly as restricted as a Reploid's, even on Blues' system. There were things the young Robot Master wasn't allowed to do, but bringing X over to play wasn't one of them.

'_Comm or sec net?_'

Hmm. '_Sec net._' It felt like there was more room to play there.

"Give me a minute," X said, moving down the hallway towards one of the security cameras before quickly moving out of the machine's line of sight. Fracturing as he pressed against the terminal the camera was docked to, he reached out for Rock's energy, his defense system coming fully online and masking his log-on from the security team.

With the same adeptness that Blues displayed, Rock grabbed a hold of X and deposited him in the secure portion that he was sequestered in, the various shields crackling around him as Rock registered X as a friendly entity to his systems, even on the network.

X let the system come fully online, shields up despite the secure presence on the net, and his visor dropped down over his eyes, supplying an all-green status window. He remained still for a moment, listening to the soft hum of the two songs that made up the Harmony that his brothers…

X stopped for a moment, blinking, as he increased the audio input of the signals, listened closely to the sounds, and tried to make out why he thought he could hear a _third_ resonance in the Harmony.

_Shit_. Shadow immediately cloaked himself even on the network, drawing his presence into his nexus and putting up security wall after security wall to keep the android from detecting him. 'Rock_. Don't just pull him online whenever you feel like it!_' Shadow's voice was sharp over their private link: there were things here that X was better off not knowing about.

'_Sorry! I didn't mean to—he didn't see you, did he?_' Rock had to appear outwardly calm and it took a _lot_ of doing to not let his stress reflect in his song too much. Shadow retreated quickly, so X wouldn't have heard more than a few notes, but…

Actually, Rock realized, the sudden shift in his own song might cover up Shadow's.

'_Are you okay?_' X asked as Rock's tune shifted ever so slightly, dropping its volume some. '_Rock, did something happen?_'

Inwardly, Rock was thanking fate that X wasn't experienced enough with the Harmony to understand what he just heard. '_No, I'm okay. It's just—I realized I never came onto the network with you before, and I wasn't sure how to…but I figured it out now._' With that, Rock's focus coalesced near X in much the same way Blues' had so many times before. '_Did Blues show you how to prompt us for data or transfers?_'

X nodded, prompting Rock as soon as he'd established on his system that, yes, Rock was a friendly, inwardly wondering why he hadn't set that up sooner. '_You can send the file._'

Rock sent it with no small amount of delight, his focus on the network shifting and flickering as though he couldn't hold still. He had to be careful with the link so that X wouldn't initiate any of the defensive protocols Blues included in the shields, but even so, it was simple enough to prompt X with a file transfer.

X accepted the transfer, loading it to look over the code, and nestled into his own little 'couch' on the network. Switching his visual feed to a single optic, considering the low amount of data traffic, X scanned the information, dissecting and interpreting the code, humming a bit in time with the tune he 'heard' in the Harmony.

About halfway through the file, X looked towards Rock's nexus…and stopped dead. What the _heck_ was with Rock's signal? If X didn't know any better, it looked as if he was tucked into layers and layers of blown glass. Reaching out, pushing his shields outward to prevent activating any defensive systems, he touched against the outermost layer of whatever it was that Rock was shielded by. '_These aren't your defensive shields, are they?_' he asked, expanding his readout when it beeped, surprised to see that the energy he'd reached out to touch had been marked as 'possible hostile'. _Blues' energy?_ he wondered.

Rock paused with whatever bouncy thing he'd been doing on the network when X spoke; the young Robot Master almost didn't notice that X was even probing the shields. Where the android did probe, the shields shone with an iridescent luster, like a bubble blown on a summer's day, but instead of popping or weakening, the shield hardened.

Rock hesitated for a moment before speaking. '_Blues put these on me when I was…scared before._' Rock's voice got quieter and trailed off and if he's been speaking with X face-to-face, he would have avoided eye contact.

X pulled his energy back, tightened his shields around himself. '_I'm sorry,_' he whispered over their link. Seeing as he had been a prime component in Rock's upset, he pulled away from his brother's nexus a bit more, resuming the work on the program Rock had loaded to him.

Rock was quiet for several minutes, not really knowing what to say. He'd become far more still, wasn't really bouncing anymore even though his aura on the network didn't exude any distress or anxiety. Rock reached out and touched the innermost shield. This one was the strongest and the most fortified. The ones beyond it were…Rock could chew through those, but the innermost one, Rock's last line of defense? Blues didn't want _anyone_ getting through that. '_These shields…most of them are a game, too,_' Rock offered. '_Blues didn't want me to get bored or lonely while he was doing maintenance, so he gave me a lot of different things to do._'

'_You keep calling things like this a game, but…I'm not sure I understand if you and I are seeing it the same way._' He was just about finished with the code, and even though he hadn't expected any little hidden surprises (treasures) in Rock's transfer, he'd been double-checking just in case. Blues would have been disappointed with him otherwise, he knew. '_You see breaking through programs like this as something to do with your time. I…_' X let his sentence hang, not sure how to relate.

Rock frowned. '_What do you call it if it's not a game?_' Or did X think this sort of thing wasn't fun? …Was Rock making X do something he didn't like? At that thought, a small amount of stress threaded its way into Rock's song.

X had finished reading over the program code and initiated his system's download before answering. '_It's not that I don't see it as a game in some sense, so don't be upset._' He hoped he'd read that change to the Harmony right. '_It's just that, comparatively, it's going to take me at least nine times as long to break the coding, and even then, I have no idea what will happen if I get distracted from the work. It's not something I'm not up to learning, I just…need a bit more time, and I don't want to end up being a burden on you and Blues because it takes me so much longer to grasp the concept._' The download completed with a soft chime. '_I'm done loading the file,_' he said, '_so do you want me to eject from the net?_'

Rock reached out to X, careful not to upset X's defensive protocols as he sent reassuring feelings to the unit he was beginning to understand as his little brother. (Could little brothers be older? How did that work now?), and the send felt a bit like a hug would, even though X didn't have a physical body. '_You can eject now, but you're not being a burden to either of us. If…if you don't like these games, we can find something else to do,_' except the only network games Rock knew were Robot Master games.

X reached for the exit point, coming out right where he'd entered the system in the first place, and he moved back over to Rock. Kneeling, he hugged his brother as best he could before pulling away, resting his hands on Rock's shoulders. "Don't think I don't like the games. I appreciate this, and I'll try to think of it as a game, but with the security applications, with the way the lock mechanism is set to work, this…is going to feel like work for me at first. Until I get used to it, it's like being back in Doctor Cain's lab in the earlier years learning coding techniques and such." He smiled to offset any upset he might cause with his wording. "Thank you."

Rock smiled up to X. "Some games are hard to learn," like chess, "but once you do learn the rules, they're really fun." So Rock hoped this would be the case for X.

* * *

><p>Blues came online slowly. As each system and each peripheral came online, he took the time to check it over and verify that it was functioning properly before moving to the next. It took time and his queue was long, but at least he could be assured that yes, even this little bit of maintenance helped immensely. His thoughts weren't so muddled, weren't so sluggish, and he felt clear-headed. Those last hours before lying down were like walking through a thick haze.<p>

He knew that X would not consider this sufficient and the android would probably fuss—ten hours and this was all Blues got from it?-but that was the way things were, especially considering the capacity of each of his processors. He'd been wired carefully when they were installed, carefully assembled so that he wouldn't overheat very easily, but given how often he could confidently run maintenance on himself, this was the best that could be done.

Slowly, almost drowsily, he pushed himself into an upright position, looking around the room. His things were undisturbed (save his gloves: Rock still had them) and the room was quiet. He knew that X took Rock an hour or two before and that the two were now apparently playing a game on the network.

Which meant that Rock was physically unattended, not counting Shadow.

Speaking of Shadow…

'_It is good to see that you are up and about._'

'_Status report?_'

'_X left Rock's side several minutes ago in order to receive a file transfer from him. There's no one else here._'

'_And you?_'

'_My condition is optimal. All systems showing green. However, as for my opinion of this…situation we've awoken in?_'

Silence as Blues waited for Shadow to continue.

And Shadow did continue.

'_Where is this place? All of my research points to there being one livable city left on the planet—what happened to the ecosystem? There should be more than enough to sustain humanity. Furthermore, where is humanity? Every single entity Rock has encountered as been a Reploid._'

'_We are currently in mainland Asia, though not a region I ever visited. As for the planet, from what I can gather, it is the result of two centuries of near-constant warfare. The human population has been…beyond decimated and from what I can tell, there is only one human that is permanently residing in this base._'

Shadow did not voice that there being only one human here may actually work in their favor. '_And what of the X unit and the Zero unit? Light-hakasei's final creation appears to be working as intended, but Wily-hakasei's? I know what he was programmed for. What the hell was done to him?_' A part of Shadow was indignant. Killer android or no, this one was still one of Wily-hakasei's creations, still a Wilybot, even if Robot Masters didn't have a family matrix in the same sense that humanity did.

'_I cannot say for certain but, for the time being, it seems that the Zero unit is not going to fulfill that portion of its purpose. I want you to stay near Rock. Until I can verify that this is a permanent thing and not a ruse or a fluke, I do not want to chance his welfare._'

'_And what of your welfare?_'

Blues was quiet for a long moment over the link. '_…Do not worry about me._'

Shadow frowned, but did not press the issue, even if what Blues said didn't sound so much like 'don't worry' as it sounded like 'I am expendable'.

Blues stood from the bed, testing his ambulatory system briefly before getting his shoes on and tying his scarf. The sunglasses were on the console where he left them. He knew that Rock_ really_ wanted to play with them, but that was one item he couldn't allow to leave the room without being on his face.

It was a little bit cute the way Rock had ramped up the difficulty on the door lock, but Blues undid it within several moments—it was his locking system, after all—and headed to the lift, directing it to bring him to the fourth level without any intermediate stops.

With Shadow here now, he could keep tabs on Rock much more easily, even if the child could be asked directly via the network. Blues' own aura sparked outward, filtering into the networks, and he immediately strengthened his link with Rock: he was awake and he was on his way up.

It was a little strange to see X and Rock standing a little ways down the hall, past the medical lab, apparently just talking in the corridor.

X looked up, having just disengaged from the network, and smiled when he saw who was approaching them. "Good morning, Blues!" he chirped, systems sending a status update request. Even on the surface, his eldest brother looked worlds better than he had yesterday.

Rock turned, caught sight of Blues, and his entire face lit up. In seconds, Rock spanned the gap between them and was pouncing Blues at a full-on sprint, crashing into the older Robot Master with wild abandon, laughing as his happiness reverberated on the net.

Blues had to take only one step back to maintain his balance, even with Rock's unbridled energy. He couldn't help the half-smirk as he ran his fingers affectionately through Rock's hair, his other hand coming to rest on the child's shoulder. "Good morning, X," he said, scanning X in return, checking his status along with Rock's.

X's features fell a little bit when Blues' status was actually relayed, but he'd wiped the frown from his face by the time Rock turned to look at him again. "I hope you don't mind that I brought Rock out again. I figured it might be better for you to have some time for yourself without him bouncing around, and it's a good idea for him to move around the base."

Blues didn't miss the look on X's face, but chose to completely ignore it. "It was good for him, thank you." Rock was hugging Blues very tightly around the middle now and it made it hard to move, so Blues opted to stay put until Rock became tired of the deathgrip hug.

Blues was lucky he didn't need to breathe.

X realized that, right now, ignoring Blues' status was for the best. And he had a great way to divert attention. "Rock, did you tell Blues what Rocinolle's hiding in her lab?"

Rock gasped and finally stepped back from Blues, motioning excitedly as he spoke. "She showed me a salvaged mechaniloid she found. Blues, it's one of _ours_." One of the Robot Masters'. Rock's voice warbled a bit with his next words, unable to keep the wide smile from his face. "It's a _Mettaur_."

Even with the sunglasses and many of his emotional displays offlined, the surprise that crossed Blues' features was unmistakable. "A…Mettaur?" Blues didn't sound incredulous, he sounded…he sounded more like he just won the lottery and couldn't quite believe his were the winning numbers.

Rock grabbed Blues by the arm and pulled him toward X, positively beaming. "It's not functioning right now, but I think it can be repaired. It's so _cute_."

Blues tilted his head. "If we can bring it up to normal operational state, we can find out whose it was."

It was hard to imagine Rock being able to look any happier, but after those words escaped Blues' lips, Rock managed to do it.

"You should probably get going, then," X encouraged. "It's going to take some goading for Rocinolle to be okay with you two working on that one." X looked to Blues, ensured they were linked, and added, '_She received a retirement order for working on that little one because it was outside of her assignment specifications. It may take a minute to get her to be okay with working on it now because she doesn't think she's skilled enough to work on it._'

Blues nodded slowly, pulling slightly on the arm that Rock was grasping to get the child to stop: they'd be heading back to the lift then. '_I will not…push her, however, there is no reason not to work on it now._' She wasn't in danger of being killed for wanting to help a little one.

It made Blues want to remove Copy X all the more.

"Rock, if it's alright with you, I'd like to work on the lock program a little by myself. I can check back in with you and Blues later and let you know how I'm progressing." He didn't add the 'if at all' that hovered at the back of his mind; he didn't need to upset the robot any more than he already had.

Rock blinked, but nodded, glancing between X and Blues. "Okay, X. I'll show you more if you need help later," Rock promised, still clutching at Blues' arm. There was a soft chime when the lift arrived and before it began its descent, Rock waved good-bye to X.

X waved as well, opening the program as he dropped through the floor and into his room.


	19. Lockdown

_We had an excellent question posed in a review for last chapter, and we felt it necessary to address it here. There is concern that the Reploids are being portrayed as being inferior to the Robot Masters. Now, X was being built while the Wily Wars were ongoing and while the Robot Masters were still active. I do not believe for a **second** that the RMs were built, then never upgraded as time went on, **especially** in Rock's case. X and by extension, the Reploids, are more advanced than the Robot Masters in many respects, especially when it comes to physical construction. The entire point of the X project was to make him believably human, and not just in appearance (there is evidence that the RMs themselves could pass in some cases: Rock didn't recognize the copy of Light in game 9.) _

_He had to behave as a human and be able to blend in better. And if X were going to be able to blend in and not raise flags, his processing capabilities would have needed to be brought down from his predecessors'. _

_The other issue that may be causing X to seem 'inferior' is his need for all these lessons, but consider this: no one knows who the RMs were before this point in the story, so forget about how things got done in 20XX. Blues and Rock are bringing what they know of how to get things done to the table, and this is wholly new information to X and the Resistance. Had X been activated after 30 years and not a century, and had he grown up around his fellow Lightbots, he'd have learned these skills from the day he was turned on. So it's not so much that they're inferior as it is they hit a nice learning curve that they have yet to get past. _

_So X and the Resistance will learn and improve, as will the Robot Masters, and everyone will be better off for it._

_And now back to our regularly scheduled Author's Notes:_

_Lessons of the past are passed down to the next generation as Blues continues Rocinolle's tutoring, and in repairing the Mettaur she brought with from Neo Arcadia, Rock remembers another Robot Master. Phantom starts proving his new allegiance by providing new routes into the city, and Zero's remembering more of his old life, including a precious piece of tech and the weapons he used to fight with._

_**Disclaimer: **Mega Man and all related characters and information are the property of Capcom Co., Ltd., Akira Kitamura and Keiji Inafune._

* * *

><p>Rocinolle was poking around the back leg mechanisms of her ninth Kerosh when she heard footfalls nearing her lab, but didn't bother to look up. If she could just get this replacement wire to connect to that terminal…<p>

"Rocinolle!" Rock's voice rang out into the lab as he moved a step and a half ahead of Blues, still firmly grasping the older Robot Master's arm. Rock was bright and bouncy this morning, as though he'd slept a full night and then been handed a _lot_ of espresso.

Rocinolle shot up from her hunched-over position, eyes wide as the wire she'd been working with yanked free of the Kerosh. "Master Rock, Blues-sensei!" She looked worriedly toward the Kerosh before she bowed deeply. "I'm sorry, I was a little involved with repairing this unit's hind servos. I should have—"

Rock blinked at the honorific, but Blues was the one to speak. "Don't worry about it. How far along have you gotten?" He stepped over to look at the unit's circuitry, an oddly quiet Rock trailing a bit behind him, still grasping his arm.

"Well, I finished up the movement programming on the Kerosh a little while ago. I went ahead and installed the new programming unilaterally to see how all the units moved with it, see if I had to tweak anything, and this little one's been having issues with actually getting anywhere. It has a tendency of hopping and flipping over, so it ends up on its back more often than it lands a good jump. I went ahead and checked the servos and decided it might be a good idea to change out the wiring. The stuff the Neo Arcadians used was looking a little damaged, though that could have just been from whatever they did to offline this unit for recovery." She looked to Blues. "And I finished the coding on Gregory. I hoped you'd get a chance to look that over as well." Turning, she whistled, the purple Condoroid gliding over to her and dropping fluidly onto her outstretched arm.

Rock blinked, remembering something, and reached into his pocket for Blues' gloves. The elder robot took them wordlessly, making sure both were fastened on before turning his attention to the Condoroid. He reached an arm out to it, let it hop over to him as he watched its movements intently. Rock, too, had his attention anchored on the unit.

It was funny how single-minded a Robot Master became when mechaniloids were in the vicinity.

Blues brought his arm down to eye level rather abruptly and the Condoroid flapped its wings the way a living bird might, but remained perched firmly on Blues' arm. Rock reached up to it to say hello again as Blues tilted his head, accessing its coding and going over it line-by-line.

Rocinolle quietly grabbed the wire from where it had fallen on the table next to the offlined Kerosh, carefully securing it, worrying her bottom lip a bit as she tightened the wire around the second terminal. A few other minor adjustments were made to the unit as she continued tinkering in silence, hoping that her work didn't disappoint Blues.

There were things that needed to be cleaned up, of course, things that were worded clumsily in the coding, but overall, she did a good job, especially if he kept in mind that her mentality was more in line with a human's. Rock was already reaching into it, suggesting edits and fixits for Gregory. Finally, after a few moments, Blues smirked slightly. "There are some areas that need addressing, but you did a good job overall."

Rocinolle nodded, closing up the panel on the Kerosh but leaving it offline for the time being. "What did I code wrong?"

"Not so much 'wrong' as…" Blues paused for a moment, searching for a word. Unrefined sounded too much like an insult. "As…worded improperly. The message is the same, but not as concise." That was the nicest way Blues could think of putting it. The Condoroid was watching Rock, its head cocked down toward the little Robot Master, its beak clicking as Rock snuffled around in its coding, looking for all of the things to fix.

The Reploid frowned slightly, starting to chew on the inside of one cheek. "I'm being too wordy?" she asked. "The flight control codes, right? I'm…being a ground unit myself, I don't really understand the wording for flight, so…" She looked to Rock for a moment before turning back to Blues. "Could you show me how to fix it?"

"Of course," Blues said, offering the unit back to Rocinolle. "As with anything, it takes practice. In coding, the more concise you are, the more efficient the machine." So you definitely did _not_ want to be wordy.

"You did do a good job," Rock reiterated, smiling. "Especially since you've only been learning for a week; you should be proud."

Rocinolle smiled, pulling a bit of hair back behind one ear, and she leaned down, carefully turning the Kerosh over and wirelessly activating it. The miniature gears and servos whirred a bit before silencing, and the unit blinked a few times before jumping clear across the table. "I try to do what I can for these little ones." She leaned down, closer to the Kerosh, as if looking for something. The unit gave out a soft mechanical 'ribbit' and then bounded back across the table in two leaps, Rocinolle nodding before moving the unit onto another table with all the other Kerosh.

"So," she asked, "should I turn on one of the holo-screens and look over the coding now?"

Rock tugged on Blues' sleeve firmly enough that he almost had to lean down. Rock was looking up at Blues with a slight frown: '_What about the Mettaur?_'

Blues smirked, though that question damn well near got a real smile from the unit. "Ah, that's right. Rocinolle, Rock tells me you have an ancient unit here in the lab."

Eyes went wide at that, and Rocinolle froze up for a moment, her hand hovering above the controls for one of the nearby holo-screens. "I…I do, Sensei," she admitted, "but…I don't…I'm not…not ready. Not for that one."

Blues tilted his head back, evaluated her body language and expression. "I disagree. Provided the proper physical components can be procured, this one should be _easier_ to repair than the modern mechaniloids. Unless its source programming was rewritten, then its current coding set should very closely resemble exactly what we're striving to achieve here, in this lab. Furthermore…if its original coding set and data logs are intact…" Blues trailed off for a moment, the tilt of his head indicating his gaze was fixed on Rock now. "If they are intact, we will be able to see _whose_ Mettaur that was."

"The…I've replaced all the damaged components. Rewired most of the internals, got a new battery, everything I could think of. Like I told Master Rock last night, I did everything I thought I could. I…I did work on the coding a little, just to see if I could get it running, but you'll probably be able to see exactly what was mine, considering I've been using the wrong coding language. Nothing's been deleted, though, so…" She really hoped she hadn't actually destroyed the unit trying to fix it. "I'll…I'll be right back," and she moved for the back room, returning Gregory to his perch as she moved.

Blues took a seat at the examination table and Rock climbed up onto a stool beside him, still looking quite pleased with himself despite what Rocinolle said about trying to fix the unit. But something was still bothering him. '_She keeps calling me Master,_' Rock said quietly, even over the link, glancing over to the room she'd disappeared into.

Blues looked down to Rock, quickly realizing what Rock meant by it. '_I will correct this._'

Rock snuggled a bit into Blues' side, happy that he'd take care of it.

It took a minute, considering the unit's weight, but Rocinolle did return with the cloth-wrapped bundle Rock had seen the previous night. Laying it down carefully on the table, she started unfolding and unfurling the cloth. Her eyes were steadily dancing between the Mettaur and Blues, wondering if his response would be anything like Rock's.

Blues straightened immediately, recognizing the unit as well, and not just for its design, but recognizing that yes, it was one of theirs. A _Robot Master's_ Mettaur. He wasn't as vocal as Rock was, but it was clear that he was entranced by the unit the same as Rock. He picked it up as well, turning it in his hands to inspect it and, meanwhile, Rock was looking up at it as well, eyes wide. "It's in good condition," Blues said, tilting his head, gazing at its face.

Blues _liked_ Mettaurs.

"Sensei, would…should I load a copy of the programming code so that we can go over this? If I learn from this one, from one that was programmed the right way…" She looked down. Despite Blues' assurances, she did _not_ feel ready to work on this unit. Especially with mistakes made with the Condoroid, and who knew what she'd done wrong with all the other units she'd been working on.

"I think that'd be best," so she could see what he was talking about in places where something was wrong. He placed the Mettaur back on the table and Rock was immediately on it, unable to take his eyes off it. Blues ran a hand along Rock's back as the newbuilt conducted another physical examination on the Mettaur.

Rocinolle nodded, searching her files for the hard copy she had stored, wirelessly linking it to the nearest holo-table, which flickered on almost instantly. It took a minute for the file to transfer, but soon enough, the large screen was dotted with coding. Hands flickered over controls and against the screen, highlighting sections of coding. "The things I'm highlighting are the coding bits I tried to put in, but I didn't bother with deleting anything until I could get the unit running again. I thought that if it had redundant coding between my additions and what it had that I could just edit out the redundant information later. And then there's the fact that I couldn't get it running, no matter what I tried. I had a few other people look at the coding, but I didn't let them know where I had gotten it. They weren't able to come up with anything either. I tried to do what I could, I really did, and I hope that I didn't cause any sort of irreparable harm to the unit, especially with how cute they are, and I've really tried, I just had no idea what I was doing. I think I mentioned as much last night, but things—" She stopped. "Master Rock, where are Anna and Raul?"

Rock blinked in surprise at the sudden change in subject, but Blues was the one to answer. "They're back in my room," lounging about. "However…I understand that 'Master' is a respectful title, but to us, to Robot Masters, it carries…quite a different meaning and activates protocols that…don't apply to Reploids." To say the least. "With that in mind, we've decided to begin requesting that the members of this Resistance not address us by that specific title." Though if Rocinolle wanted to try to come up with new ones, Blues wasn't going to stop her.

"Protocols?" It took a minute for the pieces to click together. "I'm sorry," she said. "I keep forgetting that you're not Reploids. The way you both look, the fact that you're…what's the term?" She pressed the fingers of one hand to her head for a moment, before, "The fact that you're both human interface units. It…throws me off a little. I honestly forget that you're a separate classification."

Blues nodded slowly, but didn't respond verbally. Instead, his head turned back toward the display, looking over the coding on the screen. Rock didn't have much of a reaction to Rocinolle's words, merely accepting them. As though they were used to hearing words along those lines. "To being with," Blues almost murmured, eyeing the code, "using the two languages would have severely slowed the unit…" So those changes would need to be struck from the board.

Hands tapped a few controls and the highlighted text was deleted from the coding. "Okay, so that brings it back to where it was when I found it." She frowned. "It? Him? Her? Is there a specification I should be using?"

"That would have depended on the Master's preference…" Blues' voice trailed off, staring at something on the screen. A millisecond later, Rock made a soft sound and also stared at a point near the top of the screen.

"I see it," Rock said softly.

"You see the…" Rocinolle stopped, turned back toward the screen, and started looking over the coding, going line by line though it to try and see if she could find it. Now that she knew the language set she _needed_ to use, it was just a matter of finding what was wrong. "Please don't tell me, Rock," she said, waving a hand behind her in a sort of 'hold on' gesture to keep either of them from saying something.

Rock's eyes grew round as he scanned the coding again. And again. A prickling feeling went through Rock's systems as Blues smirked and rested his head in his hand. Rock knew this. He knew this coding, knew this style. It was just out of his grasp, and he scanned the coding again. Once more. Familiar. It was so, so familiar, the same way Blues was familiar. The child straightened abruptly, mouth opening slightly in awe, surprise, and some strange mixture of grief and joy. "This is…this is _Ice's_ unit…"

It was as if the conversation behind her wasn't even happening. She'd stumbled onto one part of the code that just looked out of place, but the longer she stared at it, the more it looked like…

Reaching over, she isolated the code, looking over it thrice more before realizing what was wrong. "This," she said, pointing to the screen. "This part right here. It's been jumbled, doesn't make sense like this. It's all just meaningless data that's disrupting one of the core systems." But how to fix it?

Blues nodded shortly, still resting his head in one hand, though not in a way that expressed boredom. He looked smug. Rock was glancing rapidly between the Met, the coding, and Blues. "That's right. That's part of its initialization sequence that's so chaotic." So what did Rocinolle think was best to do?

Rocinolle actually grabbed a chair, dropping down into it and gazing up at the coding. "Well, without that in line, the Mettaur won't even gear on, so all the system coding after that wouldn't really help any except to get a concept of the coding style. There are a few differences here from what I've seen of yours, but…" She fell silent for a moment, looking at the chunk of code.

It took about five minutes, but she suddenly sat up in her chair. "Wait, I think I have it." Leaning over, she grabbed a data pad, jotting something onto it quickly, looking back and forth between her little screen and the larger one displaying the coding data. "Here," she said, handing the data pad to Blues, "that's the coding as it's supposed to be. I may be missing a few nuances because of the different style, but that's about the best I can figure."

Blues took a moment to read it, then nodded. He picked up her pen and made some corrections. "You are correct, but these changes will adhere more firmly to our brother's coding style. It is fortunate that it was his; he was a unit whose primary function directly entailed overseeing large batches of subservient units. He was one of the more experienced of the Robot Masters at editing coding this way," and thus, was a good model, a good teacher, for Rocinolle.

Rocinolle took the pad back, looking over the corrections Blues had made, and nodded. "You said this was your brother?" she asked. "He's got…" she wanted to say a quirky style of coding, but wasn't sure how that would relate to them, "a…playful coding style," she finally hazarded. "So, should I just put the amended code in place of this section?" She highlighted the sequence she'd corrected. "Or is there more I need to change?"

"That was the only error that was preventing its functioning. It will need to defrag and run file maintenance to clean itself up," Blues said, finally straightening a bit. All of that fuss for a five-millisecond fix. No wonder the humans built Robot Masters. Rock was looking down at the tabletop with intensity, his eyes unfocused. When Blues reached out to Rock, reached into his systems, he felt that Rock was working very hard at recovering memory files.

Good. Blues sent his approval over the link along with his reassurance. Rock was still a little unsure after his last recovered file, but Blues pointed out that he had a statistically larger chance of finding a good memory. The wars had certainly been hell in a hand basket, but they were relatively short, chaotic, draining periods of time. In-between? Blues went out of his way to make sure Rock could have something of a normal existence.

Another nod, and Rocinolle entered the changes into the coding, saving the file to her systems and turning to the Mettaur. "With this, just remove the changes I made and the damaged part of the coding, input the corrected code, and it'll…it'll start running?" Her voice was hopeful, though there was worry there too. She didn't want to affect this unit in a negative way, especially knowing just how _old_ it was. "It'll be okay without your brother here to…take care of it?"

"We can look after it in his place," Rock said with a nod, still inspecting the Mettaur, tilting it slightly to look at its face again. "It will probably miss him," and Rock's voice was a bit quieter at that; he missed Ice, too, "but we can take care of it."

Rocinolle looked down at the unit for a moment, letting her hands rest against the Mettaur's helmet, before she grabbed a cable from one of the cabinets in the lab. "I kind of had to build this from scratch when I found it because the data ports are so drastically different." She plugged her end in before jacking into the Mettaur, quickly correcting the coding, and she waited for it to activate.

Blues was still smirking from Rock's antics, so his expression didn't change as he delved into the Mettaur's systems. He had easy access and checked over Rocinolle's edits and the rest of the coding, just to be sure, before issuing the command to the unit to activate.

The Mettaur sort of startled and blinked its round eyes at Rock, optics focusing as it noted, then identified, the two Robot Masters in its systems. Both friendly. It made a soft whirring sound, taking a step toward Rock, more into his arms, and made a soft, contented chirring sound. Rock smiled, almost trembling with emotion as he picked the Met up again, holding it up to look at, even as it began scanning the room. "Hello, little one." The Met shifted to look down to Rock, making a slight beeping noise before chirring again.

The Reploid's eyes had gone wide the minute the unit started moving, and she remained silent for a long while, only able to stare at the Mettaur as it moved and chirred.

Blues bent over Rock and the Met, checking it over himself, but not removing it from Rock's grasp. It was clear that, for the moment, Rock was not going to release it and he'd be very, very, very sad if he had to. "It recognizes us," Blues said at length, straightening up as he ran a hand affectionately through Rock's hair. He was smirking again.

"See?" Rock's voice was quiet, but brimming with emotion. "It was a quick fix." Rock made his way over to Rocinolle to let her meet the Mettaur, too. "Ice would want to thank you for looking after this unit, but he can't. So thank you, for him and for us."

Rocinolle smiled at the unit, petting it gently. "You're welcome," she whispered, tears brimming in the corners of her eyes. "Does…did your brother give this one a name?" Did they actually name their mechaniloids the way she did?

Rock looked up to Blues: he would be better suited to explain. "No, not in…not in the sense that humans name things. Not a spoken name. Robot Masters network, as we said, but not just with each other. The lesser units are present on the Master's network as well. On there, there are…designations given to each individual unit. We most often translate these designations, these signals, into audio waves when we're dealing with a unit that cannot receive the sensory data raw. As with humans or Reploids." Not that many humans Blues ever met were remotely interested in a Mettaur's name.

"Do…" Rocinolle stopped for a moment, petting the Mettaur. "Do you think he'd want a name? Since all of the other mechaniloids here have them?" The thought hit her, and she blinked a few times before looking at Blues. "Speaking of which, are the mechaniloids offended that I gave them gender-specific names and such?" She hadn't even considered that until just now.

Behind his shades, Blues blinked. It was odd to see another person that wasn't a Robot Master care so much for the mechaniloids' feelings and welfare. Of course, she was a Reploid, and human-Reploid relations in this time period were…

Were something that the Robot Masters never had a chance of achieving in 20XX.

"They're happy to have names," no matter what language, "and I think Ice would have been…pleased to see you take so much care."

The brunette nodded, looking at the unit. Behind her eyes, her systems were going through every book and database she'd ever accessed that had anything to do with name meanings. After a moment, her eyes lit up. "I got it!" she said, smiling. "We can call this one Sheridan. The name isn't gender-specific, and the meaning fits."

Rock looked up to Rocinolle curiously. "What does Sheridan mean?"

Rocinolle was practically beaming. "It means 'long-lived treasure'," she answered.

Rock's face lit up and even Blues seemed to approve. "That's perfect!" Rock was really excited now as he turned back to the Met, which was looking to them with round, dark eyes. "Sheridan, that'll be your name!" Or, at least, his spoken designation. The unit blinked, then chirped in affirmation.

"He approves?" Rocinolle asked, then realized what she'd said. "Or would it be it, since the…" She frowned. "I'm confused."

Blues made a soft sound, like a hum. "In English, 'he' is an appropriate pronoun to use, if you'd prefer." Robot Masters took offense to being called an 'it' because of the inherent depersonification, but the mechaniloids? Sheridan certainly didn't seem to mind one way or another.

"So, you belonged to someone named 'Ice'," she said softly, petting the mechaniloid as it nuzzled into Rock's arms. "Was…was Ice a nice person? I…don't want to make any judgments, but the name isn't" normal "standard, at least in the terms Ciel and other humans use to give us our designations. I keep associating the unit you're referring to as very cold, and that doesn't work well on an emotional understanding."

"Ice was really friendly," Rock said slowly, considering what she said about the Reploids' names here. "On what terms were your designations assigned?"

"Well, my designation before here was SM-94, since I was the ninety-fourth of the Security Maintenance line. When I was brought here, Ciel spent some time helping me adjust to being around the others and gave me my name when she felt she got a feel for my personality. I guess…because I was so intent on following my heart and learning how to code, instead of tinkering with random maintenance systems, she named me Rocinolle. She took some liberties with the French word 'rossignol', which means nightingale."

Rock nodded in approval. "That's good that they give you something aside from your numbers here." Rock didn't know how he'd feel about being addressed as DLN-001 all of the time. So it was that girl, Ciel, who named all of them here? And most of the names sounded French, now that Rock thought about it.

"It would have been awkward keeping our numbers, though most of us still remember them. More than a few would probably still answer to them as well," and Rocinolle frowned at that.

"And this little one," Blues said, moving over to the Kerosh that Rocinolle had been working on when they entered, "has been moving irregularly?" He turned the mechaniloid over, began manually testing its limbs, looking to discount any possibility of mechanical failure before he looked at the coding.

"It was. I fixed what I could of the motor servos in its hind legs, but it's only jumped a few times. You saw this one when I reactivated it. If there's anything else wrong with the coding, it would be specific to this unit." She thumbed toward the other Kerosh. "They've been moving okay, but I probably got too verbose with parts of their coding, too." Once she figured out how to get a coding point across without being overly wordy about it, she'd be able to reduce the number of times she'd have similar mistakes on other units.

Blues nodded, then beckoned to Rock to come over. "I haven't yet had a chance to evaluate how well you can do this now. I want you to take a look at this unit," he told the child, guiding him to the table with one hand as he glanced back to Rocinolle. "None of his base programming should be compromised, but I'd rather test what he can do." Test whether Rock was truly back to full operational standard or if there was something deeper wrong.

Rock climbed up onto the stool so he could actually see what he was doing, then he lifted the unit and looked over its physical components, opening its access panel to check its servos first. He magnified his vision so he could see whether any of the delicate wiring was scratched or damaged, then tilted his head. Perhaps it was the coding?

Ah, yes. Again, not really wrong, but just clumsily worded. Oh, there was one mistake, but that was a quick fix, a matter of rewriting only a line or two. Nothing major. Rock blinked as he continued combing through the coding, still looking at the unit's components. "You were a little wordy, but it's not that bad. There was only one mistake; I think that's what was making its movements so jerky."

"Could you show me which lines?" she asked, leaning over to watch Rock work.

"Sure!" Rock glanced up, to the holo-screen terminal, and its displayed image flickered and shifted to a new coding set. "That's the Kerosh's coding. You really did do a good job, especially when the first language you learned was a different one." Changing over was hard for humans, so Rock thought it might be a bit hard for Reploids, too. "But…do you want me to include it on the screen and let you find it, or do you want me to point it out?"

"It'd be best for me to figure it out myself, but…don't wait too long. Maybe five, ten minutes at the most?" she suggested.

"I'll give you a warning, then, and if you want longer, you can tell me?"

"That works," she agreed, dropping into her chair and letting her eyes scan over the coding.

About four minutes later, she shot up suddenly, pressing her hand against one section. "This! This here!"

Rock nodded enthusiastically. "It's the wrong command," and Rock already sent his edit to Blues. "Did you want to write the edit, too?" They were kind of sharing this lesson, weren't they? Even if what Blues was looking for from each was completely different.

"Um…" she said, stepping a couple paces back. "I…" she began, frowning. "Okay, I know that's the coding for the leg servo motors. I figured the basics out, how the whole jumping mechanism works…but that's where I've been stuck. I don't know how to make that not wordy. It's a complex little thing for me, but I think part of it is I keep trying to see them from a Reploid's point of view first to get an idea, and that's completely backwards to what I'm supposed to be doing." She looked down a bit at that, having admitted that she was still using some of the aspects of her older coding knowledge. "If I…" Grabbing her data pad, she entered in a shorter version of the command string and showed it to Rock. "I know it's still a little wordy, but is that any better?"

Rock took the pad and pondered her coding, then entered an alternate. "That's better, that is correct, I guess, but…see, this here is still…" He entered in a further simplified form. "Does taking it down in steps like this make it easier to see? You're telling it to do the same thing, just a shorter command. So it's like, it hears and understands the command more quickly, so it acts more quickly." Did that help? Rock looked to Rocinolle, then to Blues.

"Okay, but if that's the case…" She jotted a new line, a step shorter than Rock's. "That still works, doesn't it?"

She turned to look at the holo-screen. "And that's just the mistake code. You said there was still a wordy section elsewhere?" She pondered the code again, looking for it.

"Writing concisely is an ongoing process," Blues said. He was still standing a few steps back from Rock and Rocinolle, letting them work it out between them before he evaluated it. "You will fix something, but weeks later, when you go over it again, you realize that there is a better way to put it. So you edit again. It is…something of an art."

"Blues is right," Rock said. "See? Like here—this isn't wrong, but it could be said better, right?" He pointed to a portion of the coding. "You have to learn to look for things like that. If it's vague or takes too long to say, it'll confuse the unit."

She nodded, still looking over the code. "Wait, here and here," she said, highlighting two sections of code. "Can I get the data pad for a minute?"

Rock handed the data pad over. Blues had returned to Sheridan and picked the Mettaur up, inspecting it again as its feet wiggled some, feeling for the ground. He slipped an arm under the unit, gave it support as he strengthened his link with it, looking through Ice's coding once again.

Rocinolle's hand danced across the data pad's screen, stylus flowing across two new program windows as she edited the coding she'd highlighted. "Here," she said, a few minutes later, as she handed the item back to Rock. "Those may not be the mistake you saw, but they were a bit long. Those command strings are about half the size, but they're still what the units need." She really hoped she'd worded the strings right this time.

Rock took the data pad back, glancing over it. His face brightened. "Yes. Yes, that's what I was talking about. This is _much_ better." He nodded to himself several times, then offered the data pad to Blues.

Cradling the Mettaur in one arm, Blues accepted the data pad and took a few moments to flick through their edits and changes. "This is much more in line with what the coding should look like," Blues agreed as Sheridan cheeped. "It's a vast improvement. Very good." He nodded, handing the data pad back to Rock. "Go ahead and update its coding. We'll see if that helps."

* * *

><p>Zero pushed himself from the table as Cerveau saved the log and shut down the terminal he'd been working at. "If there's nothing else, I need to get Phantom up to the sec floor, let him and Hirondelle do their spy thing at each other for a while."<p>

"No, you're all clear now," Cerveau said, nodding as he moved the files over to his main console, compiling the data for analysis. "Thank you for providing this data, Master Zero."

Phantom smirked, shaking his head. "It's not just a 'spy' thing, Master Zero, it's information reconnaissance and collection."

"You're a spy," Zero deadpanned. "Hirondelle's a spy. You two are going to do that spy thing at each other."

The Guardian couldn't help but laugh. "If you want to put it that way, sure. Regardless," he got to his feet, "we should get going. I'm certain there's at least a few things I can do to help, even if I'm not directly involved."

Zero moved to Phantom, wrapping one hand around the Reploid's arm, and escorted him from the room.

"So, I was a bit impressed with the work on the fob you made," Phantom noted.

"I don't see why. I was bored and it was something to do."

"True, but for someone to be able to actually break a locking mechanisms coding sequence? To date, I'm the only one of my siblings who was able to get out of a locked room. It's not as easy as you're trying to make it sound."

Zero shrugged. "I used to do a lot of coding modifications to my equipment before, so it's good practice to get me back up to snuff with that. I doubt much in the ability of armor upgrades because the armor sets are vastly different now than they were back then, but I can probably fiddle with whatever weapons I have. Been thinking about sitting down with Cerveau and making a few new ones, considering my weapon skillsets aren't doing much of anything without the weapons related to them." Zero stopped short, hand tightening ever so slightly on Phantom's arm, and the blonde groaned.

"What's wrong, Master Zero?"

"My _Adion_," he said, and there was a hint of sadness in his eyes. "Oh, man, I hope that didn't get destroyed since the last time I was active."

"Forgive me for asking a question I should know the answer to, but what is an Adion?"

"An Adion was a classification of Ride Chaser from back during the Maverick Wars. There were several others, both Armor and Chaser designations, but the Adion was _my baby_." He had put so much effort into getting top performance specs out of that machine, and it was all starting to flood back. "Any chance your dad had a secret vault where he kept stuff?"

Phantom shrugged. "It wouldn't be secret if I knew about it." Not that the information officer hadn't been able to find out about a few of X's hidey-holes throughout the city. "It is possible, considering how much Father cared about you, but offhand, I wouldn't be able to say whether or not he did."

Zero sent a request signal to the lift as he and Phantom approached the shaft. "I really hope he did, but I think I'll manage either way." Not to say that it didn't sting a little. "Now that those memories are starting to recover, I think the Ride Chaser was the reason that I learned how to modify code, how to fine-tune the tech I used."

Stepping onto the lift as it arrived, Phantom looked to Zero. "You said you learned because of your Ride Chaser, but…I don't get how coding relates to that. Wouldn't most of your work on that have been mechanical or structural?"

"Some of it was," Zero said, ticking his head to the side as he tried to figure out which memories correlated with his work on the Chaser. "The coding was modifying the ways that the components worked. Greater boost capacity, higher speed, stuff that had to be changed up both internally and externally."

Both lapsed into silence as the lift continued its upward climb, a few of the security team boarding before everyone stepped off on the second level.

"Colbor," Zero called out to one of the team, "where is Hirondelle's office?"

"Sixth door on the left past that first turn. Swing a right at the corner and it's right down the hall."

"Thanks."

Phantom and Zero moved down the hallway, the Guardian hanging his head a little as they continued.

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing, Master Zero," Phantom answered. "It…it still feels a little weird, knowing the oaths I took to the city, knowing what I promised all those years ago, and to voluntarily betray all of that…"

Zero shook his head. "That's not your city anymore," he said. "Once your father's body was sealed, it became someone else's city. The people you know may all be the same as they were before, but the one in power is abusing that. It's not your city, not the place you promised to protect anymore. Besides, do you really think that, had it been your father's city, you would have been able to convince _anyone _that there was a reason for a retirement order to be placed against you?"

Ebony eyes widened. "But if it were my father's city, it wouldn't—"

"Have been necessary. That's exactly my point. You're not betraying any oaths or allegiances by doing this. You're taking the city back, restoring to power those that actually knew how to run it. Even if X does eventually hand the 'throne' off to someone else," and he made air quotes at that, "he'll at least make a sound judgment call about who is to take his place. He's not going to let this fall to ruin beneath him, not the way that Copy X has."

"I guess you're right," Phantom said with a slight nod. "Well, this is the sixth door," he said, motioning to the door on their left. "Should we knock first?"

"Knowing Hirondelle, it's likely that he already knows we're here." Zero smirked. "Being a spy and all."

As if on command, the door swung open, and Hirondelle stepped out, waving the two into the room. "Come on, we've got a lot to work on, and the sooner we get started the better."

Zero and Phantom both smirked. For the way he was when not on assignment, Hirondelle was incredibly laid back. On duty? He was all business.

"Okay, so, first things first," Hirondelle said, leaning over the console in the middle of the room, "we need to verify that we're working with the same map of the city. The one I have is a little dated, since I haven't been able to get access codes for the city in about six months, so there may have been changes I'm not aware of. I'm certain from the version I'm working with that Master Zero's lab was not on record until recently, but beyond that," and he shrugged.

Zero and Phantom moved up to the console, watching as the holo-display of Neo Arcadia shimmered into view.

"Would the three of you get off your asses and get over here?" Hirondelle suddenly said, and Moineau, Pelerin, and Aigle moved over to the table. "I swear, you're acting like Guardian Phantom is actually here on reasons other than those he specified."

"All things considered, sir," Pelerin said, "until just yesterday, Guardian Phantom was an enemy that wanted us dead. We don't mean any offense, but we can't just override four years of being afraid of him that easily."

"You can't," Hirondelle said, sighing, as he rested his hands against the table. "I, however, am not you." He turned to Phantom, seemingly noticing for the first time that the Guardian was still in restraints. "Guardian Phantom, if you could kindly remove your bindings."

Zero moved to grab his data stick at nearly the same time as Moineau reached for the fob key, and Hirondelle stopped them both. "I asked Guardian Phantom, not either of the ones with keys."

Phantom closed his eyes as he hung his head, hacking past the defensive firewalls of the cuffs to grant himself wireless access to the coding mainframe. A moment later, he drew his hands from behind his back, tossing the cuffs to Moineau.

The three security officers gaped at the Guardian.

"Honestly, you're dealing with the head of the Neo Arcadian intelligence network, and you honestly think that he can be restrained simply by handcuffing him? If Guardian Phantom really wanted to bring harm to anyone here, he'd have been uncuffed, fully armed and armored, and were it not for the two Robot Masters currently keeping an eye on our networks, Guardian Phantom would have been all over those and generating false administrative passcodes to keep him logged on despite the best efforts of our security team. I personally think it says a lot about him to know that he's allowing the cuffs to remain on and his weapons locked down elsewhere in the base."

"I'm thankful for the consideration and the recognition you give my skill. I hadn't thought anyone but my father would be aware of my abilities."

Hirondelle smiled. "I worked in the city on a investigations team that worked parallel to your own, Guardian Phantom. I'm familiar with a lot of the work you did."

"Wait. I thought Phantom worked interrogations."

"That was my specialty," the Reploid explained to Zero, "but I was an investigator as well, since that was the broader scope in which I worked. I didn't spend a lot of time in the field, though, since most of my work was breaking through security systems that our suspects had built over their own equipment and tech, so I've gotten a bit of experience working with things of that nature." He turned back to the information officer. "As for the map, if someone can give me a data stick, I can provide an updated map for you no problem."

Aigle grabbed a small stick from a nearby desk, tossing it to Phantom.

Plugging the item into the primary port, Phantom quickly selected the modified map he had, passing the stick to Hirondelle when he was done. "Go ahead and load that; I'll give you a run-down."

Hirondelle examined the stick, plugging into a small box nearby. "Just have to check for malicious uploads."

"No problem," Phantom returned. "I'd have been upset to know an ex-investigator actually got lax after leaving the city."

When the lights on the top of the box turned green, Hirondelle quickly loaded up the map, surprised to see not only a collection of updates, but a wave of little dots all over the map in several different colors. "What are these?" he said.

"Entry and exit points for the city. The red dots along the city are monitored access points between Neo Arcadia and Sub Arcadia. You do _not _want to use those to get anywhere in the city unless you mean for it to be a suicide run. The orange dots mark areas where you can get to the city proper without any immediate threat of running into a patrol, but it's still risky going topside, so you need to keep your guard up. The yellow markers here are areas where you've got the best chance of getting in and out of the city without anyone noticing you."

Reaching for the controls, Phantom quickly removed the map of the city to fully display the Sub Arcadian map. "Same thing here as before. The red marks areas you don't want to try to get in through, orange is iffy, and yellow should be safe. Green and blue markers are the Trans Servers that are still active in Sub Arcadia, but the ones marked in blue are monitored, so that runs a bit of a risk to use. I've got access codes and Trans coordinates for every Server in the city, so if there's a point that you want in at, I can set it up. From what Blues-dono has been able to do, we should be able to offset the city noticing any of the Servers going active, but we'll see how that turns out and if Blues-dono would be interested in joining."

One more swipe of his hands across the controls, and a third level was displayed. "Here's the real ways you'd be looking to get in. The area beneath Sub Arcadia is almost completely abandoned, and it's rare to ever see patrols or scouts down there. There's about a hundred different access points from beneath the Eden Dome's foundation wall, so we've got plenty of ways to get in. From there, it's just determining where we want to go, what we're hitting the city for, and how much time we're going to afford."

"Looks good," Hirondelle noticed. "My only concern is that a lot of your own access may be modified by your physical specs. Not all of the Reploids here are going to be able to keep up."

"Whether or not that's true about them keeping up, we still have to consider the fact that I know my way around very well and can work as an advance scout. If I'm not directly involved, that's fine, and if you want me to remain at base and just provide the course in and out of the city, I'm not going to argue."

"You try too hard to prove yourself," Hirondelle said. "I would personally vouch for your work on our next raid, regardless of whether or not the rest of the base would see that as a wise idea. As I said, there are several things you could have done by now that you have not."

"Units like Canard would be disappointed that you think me trustworthy so soon."

Hirondelle snorted at that, hand snapping up over his mouth. "No offense, Guardian Phantom, but Canard is not who you should be using as a litmus test of who does and doesn't approve of my actions."

"The guy seems a bit of a problem," Zero piped up, pushing away from the table. "Bit of an attitude."

"You understate the problems we have had with him," Hirondelle said, shrugging. "As I said, I know what you are capable of. You have done none of this, though it is likely the opportunity has been there. That aside, you are Master X's son, and to have left the city as you did? It speaks far more about your character and your trustworthiness than most might think."

* * *

><p>Ciel dropped against her desk, groaning as she let her forehead impact against the metal softly.<p>

"Is everything okay?" Milan asked, moving his chair over to her and resting a hand against her back.

"I'm fine. It's just…Master Zero's memories are scattered. For the files he can provide date stamps for, the file length can be a few seconds to full minutes, maybe even hours. The rest of the data is coming in sporadically, and there's just…there's no pattern to this. At all."

"So you're saying that his system is just picking and choosing files at random to fix?"

"That's what it looks like. I don't know if I'm missing something or if—"

"He's defragmenting his memory drive," Milan cut her off. "Think about it, Ciel. Zero, actively, is about two hundred years old, longer if you count his construction phase. That's got to be a few yottabytes of data at minimum, plus the fact that age deterioration and the surge that hit the system during his recovery from Neo Arcadia…" He leaned over, looked at the screen, and nodded. "It's very likely that his system is going for the files that are the least damaged to prioritize the repair process."

Ciel looked at the data, then shrugged. "Maybe. I keep forgetting that data repairs like that still work the same as computers, even if the data is of a different type and far more complex." She stared at the screen for a minute. "Do you think it would be a good idea to get scans of Zero's processor to see if there's been any actual physical damage to his processor?"

"I can't see a reason why. Overloads and surges usually just frazzle the system; we've got built-in protections to prevent physical damage from that kind of thing."

"I was thinking more in line with something that deteriorated because of his stasis, but even so, the nanites should have buffered that all out by now." She blinked. "Well, that's another point I'm not figuring on. Master Zero's got one of the most advanced auto-repair functions for his time, and that system still performs better than some current-generation auto-repairs."

"Are his auto-repairs anything like Master X's? I remember you saying to had to figure out the coding when you were working on building…" His words drifted off.

Ciel sighed. "You know, it doesn't bother me that much to know that I built Copy X. It bothers me that I wasn't able to finish him. It bothers me that whoever stole him dropped him into Master X's place, somehow made sure that no one could tell the difference, and then failed to help the copy to keep the city in order." That didn't, however, mean that she didn't feel at least partially at fault for what had happened to the city since her creation had been placed in command. Every single person in the base was a survivor of his senseless punishment of Reploids for simply being themselves. "And I would have to see what Zero's program looks like. My great-grandmother didn't really fill the family in on those details, so it's not like that was a bedtime story for me." She smiled, laughing a little. "I think it would have been odd if coding lessons and programming systems were part of my bedtime routine growing up."

"They were part of your routine every other moment of your day," Milan returned.

"Regardless, I doubt looking at the repair system's coding would help. It'd be more along the lines of seeing how his nanite interface is working to address the damage, if at all." She brightened up. "Actually, that would work. If I can get copies of Master Zero's nanite activity logs, I can see if that's had any direct correlation with memory recovery. From there…" And there was _that look_ in her eyes. "Milan, let's head down to Cerveau's, see what he thinks."

Pushing himself to his feet, he headed for the door. "Already on my way."

* * *

><p>Phantom turned his back to Zero, letting the android cuff him again before they left Hirondelle's room.<p>

"Y'know, you shouldn't have to wear those things much longer. What Hirondelle said aside, you provided a lot of intel for the Resistance today." In Zero's book, that had counted for a lot.

"I still intend to wait for when I get the all-clear. I don't need to upset anyone because a few people in the base think it's okay for me to be moving around on my own." Phantom looked to the blonde. "So, what now?"

"I'm not entirely certain," Zero admitted. "I've been considering talking to Cerveau about building new versions of some of my older weapons, but a lot of what I remember how to use I don't remember how it was built."

"What's wrong with building from scratch?" Phantom asked.

"Nothing, really, except my skills are in hacking and modifications. I'm not the type that actually takes a bunch of parts and puts something together," even if, in essence, he had to do that for his saber and pistol. "Although, from what I hear, Cerveau and Doigt are good weapons techs, but even then," he waved his hand, "not today."

Phantom tilted his head to the side as he and Zero waited for the lift, resting his back against the wall. "You sound like the idea of asking for help bothers you."

"Not really asking for help, just…" He shook his head, smirking. "I specialize in the use of over a dozen different weapons, so it would end up that I could only carry a few at a time. Some are more difficult than others to wield, since, for example, I know how to use a naginata, but polearm weapons are…well, _polearm_ weapons."

"Leviathan specializes in polearm weapons," Phantom pointed out.

"Your sister also specializes in aquatic combat. If she's designed to work in water, she's built to compensate for the water tension that slows down normal units. Something like a spear or glaive could prove _devastating_ if she's got a speed advantage. Plus, even if she's not in the water, certain polearm weapons are great for disarming opponents."

That was true, Phantom mused. "What about the other weapons?"

"It's a bunch of different stuff. Tonfas, whips, throwing daggers, war fans, three-sec—"

"Wait. _War fans_?" Phantom looked shocked. "You know how to fight with war fans?"

"Yes," Zero said. "What of it?"

"Aren't…aren't those traditionally used by females?"

Zero sighed heavily as he facepalmed. "What is with this gender confusion thing with me? No, war fans are not gender-specific to females. I will admit that my skillset works with beam fans, so it's a little different than what some people might expect, but…" Zero knew which weapon set he was building first, even if it _was_ just to prove a point.

"So, what, then?" Phantom asked, boarding the lift.

"Back down to my room, I guess. There's not that much that can be done right now, seeing as most of the base is still stuck in this mindset that you're a threat."

As the lift stopped on the lowest level of the base and the two moved for Zero's room, Phantom slowed a bit. "You think my father is in his room?"

"I don't have a clue. The way he acted to me asking why he didn't have a room would make me think probably not, but I guess it wouldn't hurt to check." Moving to the door, Zero knocked lightly. "X, you home?" he asked.

The door swung open a few seconds later, X hovering over the bed, his eyes closed.

"Father?" Phantom asked carefully, keeping his voice low.

"Hi, Phantom," X called out. "What brings you and Zero…" he stopped his brow furrowing deeply, as if he were focusing on something. "Sorry, little distracted. Rock gave me a lock program, and…he calls it a game, but I'm having a bit of difficulty getting this last layer of encryption to actually…" He sighed, opening his eyes. "What brings you two down here?"

"Finished up with Hirondelle," Phantom answered, "and we weren't really sure what else could be done. I'm not much of a use to anyone in restraints, so I think we were just going to go to the room and be bored."

"Mind joining me in a game of 'crack the lock sequence'?" X asked.

"The program you mentioned?" Zero asked.

"Yeah. I figured since the two of you were a little more focused on coding and code hacking that maybe you could help with whatever I'm getting stuck on." He frowned again. "Though I'm not certain how I could go about transferring the program."

"Data stick?" Zero suggested.

"He doesn't have a port," Phantom quickly corrected.

"No, but he's been able to download into or interface with pretty much every piece of tech in this facility." Zero dug around through a box of items he'd gotten from Cerveau, pulling one of the small devices from the container. "Can you use these?" he asked.

X pondered the little device for a moment before reaching one arm out, the limb fracturing into a plethora of lights as his energy flowed toward the data stick. Once he'd established a link into the device, he copied and uploaded the lock program, waiting for the item to register and accept the file transfer, and he smiled as he withdrew his hand. Reforming, he shrugged. "I think it transferred okay."

Zero plugged the stick into his data port, downloading the program before tossing the stick over to Phantom.

Phantom hadn't even verified the link to the device before Zero muttered out a shocked, "What in the name of…?"

"Now you see why I'm stuck?"

"I see why you're stuck and I'm trying to figure out why you called this a _game_," Zero answered. "This is…this makes the lock program on the cuffs look like something a first-week newbuilt could crack."

Phantom looked at the data stick hesitantly before plugging up and downloading the program.

It didn't take long for his expression to match Zero's. "This is a _game_ to Uncle Rock?"

X smiled, though the motion was a bit strained, and he reached out, surprised to find his link with Rock still active. '_Rock, I need a bit of a hand with the program you gave me,_' he admitted. '_That final encryption is…we're _all_ stuck on it._'

Rock reached over the link, giving X a hug as a greeting before blinking, a bit of confusion translating through. '_All?_'

'_I gave copies of the program to Phantom and Zero. All three of us are looking at this last bit and wondering how we're supposed to get it open. I've tried everything I could think of, including all the stuff I did on the other layers, but it's just…I'm _stuck_._'

Rock was still hugging X via the link, still snuggling up to him as he considered what X was saying. '_Let me see?_'

X passed the sequence he'd been working on to Rock, along with copies of all the sequences he'd broken through already and the records of how he'd unbound each of the layers. '_Like I said, I'm on the last layer and it's leaving me stumped._'

Rock settled with the data, almost like he had it on his lap as he considered it. He immediately knew how to undo the encryption, but just doing it wouldn't help X. What would was…what would help was helping X see how to approach it. '_You're approaching it from the wrong direction._' Rock tugged on the encryption as a clue, then bounced the file back. '_Do you see where I started? Get through that part first. There's another layer beneath it; that's why you don't have a complete data set to unlock it with. Don't input anything into it; it'll just spit back false information._'

'_But…that's the butt end of the code. Why would I start all the way at the end?_' X was honestly confused.

Rock paused there, blinking down at the code. It seemed so obvious to him—of course you'd start here for this one—so he had to stop and think about _why_ it was so obvious. '_The best way to tell is that the front end was giving you nothing but nonsense, so the point of genesis has to be somewhere else. Um…_' Rock trailed off, looking the coding over. '_I think a lot of recognizing it comes from experience, but remember, these are locks. They're made to keep people out. So the coder will do what they can to confuse the hacker. You should learn to expect things like this._'

X nodded over the link, looking over the code from where Rock had indicated, and when he realized that he needed to read the code backwards to make sense of the first layer, the pieces fell into place. With a soft chime that X didn't know whether or not it had translated onto the link, the lock 'popped' open for him. '_I got it!_' he cried happily.

A feeling like pure delight reverberated from Rock's side of the link: X was so happy that he won this part of the game, so now Rock was really happy. It was fun! '_That's good! You broke it down more quickly than I projected,_' and Rock didn't care that X asked for help: this was a learning process. '_If you tell it to reset, it'll generate a new lock, though it'll ask you whether you want a harder one first,_' which was not a kindness that Blues' lock program offered.

X nodded across the link; "Hey, did either of you try reading the code backwards from the end and then under the first layer of data?" he offered, both of the units in the room looking at him in confusion, then surprise, when their own programs responded in kind.

"Oh, wow," Zero said. "How did you figure that one out?"

"Had a little help," X admitted. '_Rock, if all three of us reset the program, will we each get a different lock system to break?_' Or would it be three copies of the same permutation?

'_No, it's randomly generated,_' which was half the fun: what use were patterns?

"So what now?" Phantom asked.

"Reset the system," X said calmly, telling his own program copy that, no, he did not want to change the difficulty. Not yet, anyway.

"Oh, cool, I can increase the difficulty," Zero said, pumping his fists in the air and selecting the option before his eyes nearly bugged out of his head. "For the love of…X, this version has forty-seven layers!"

"Wow," Phantom said, looking at Zero. "You got the short straw. I only got thirty-two."

X looked to the ground when he realized that he was the only one that had remained at the starting level. "I…I actually didn't up the ante," he admitted. "I wanted to try and crack the base difficulty faster, so—"

"I bet you a hundred Energen Crystals I can hack through mine faster," Zero teased, looking at Phantom.

"With fifteen extra layers of encryption?" Phantom snorted, no amount of cockiness hidden by his tone. "You're on!"

It was an odd sight for X to watch the two hunker down and start working through their individual encryptions. Were anyone to walk into the room right then, with no idea what was going on inside their heads, they would think that Zero and Phantom had just engaged in a staring contest.

Which, considering Reploids didn't necessarily _need_ to blink, wouldn't bode well for the idea of them finishing any time soon.

X leaned back, still hovering, as he started working on the encryption set he had been provided, looking at the twenty layers of encryptions and wondering where to start with the first one.

"First encryption's down," Zero chimed after a few minutes.

Phantom's eyes narrowed a little, and a moment later, "First one's down."

X rolled his eyes a little, checked to see if the encryption on his first wall wasn't actually in standard binary, and once he'd realized it hadn't been, dropped the first wall himself. With a shrug, he added, "First one down, nineteen to go."

"You're cheating," Zero and Phantom fired off at the same time.

"I'm only trying to get my speed up, not hack like I have nothing better to do with my time," X replied.

Phantom shrugged. "It's still che—"

"Second wall's down," Zero cut in.

"Jeez, old man, stop trying so hard to prove yourself. You're going to strain something."

Zero smirked. "Third wall's down."

The two continued on, keeping each updated as wall after encryption wall came tumbling down in the program, and X was sorely tempted to amplify his reception of the Harmony just to drown out the two of them slinging insults while mentally slinging code.

X had all but two of his walls down when Phantom let out a long string of very colorful words, and part of him was left wondering who had taught his son half of what he'd just used.

"Something wrong?" Zero said with a smirk. He had, by this point, been a total of eleven encryption walls behind Phantom.

"I…I have no idea what the hell the encryption code here _is_. It looks like a line of gibberish."

X paused what he was doing to look to Phantom. "Maybe you're not at the beginning?"

"I don't think there _is_ a beginning. The more I look at it, the more it looks like the code's just recycling over itself after so long, but I can't even begin to figure out where the start point is in all of this."

"How's about you quiet down and pay attention?"Zero shot back. "Twentieth and twenty-first walls are down," he supplied, "and I'm fairly certain I know how to crack this one."

Phantom glared at Zero for a moment before turning his attention back to the code, desperately looking for where it was he was supposed to poke through the firewall's code.

It only took a few more minutes for Zero to stop and let out a frustrated sigh. "X, are you sure your brother set this up to just be firewall sequences? I could swear the one I'm looking out is glitched."

"You're just mad because you're as stuck as I am," Phantom countered.

In an excited flurry, Rock assailed X over their link again, pouncing on him, his emotional readout buzzing with happiness and elation. Something had Rock very, very excited, as though he had something really good and had just been given permission to share it.

Which was, essentially, what had just happened.

Blues wasn't entirely pleased with it, but he laid out his conditions to Rock, no exceptions. The child agreed readily.

'_X! I have something I want to show you! And Phantom! And Zero! Can you come up to Rocinolle's lab?_' Pretty please? Rock knew that this was something X would want to see and, hopefully, Phantom too.

"We can be up there in a few minutes," X replied, both verbally and over the link, and his eyes widened when he realized that he'd spoken aloud.

"Up where?" Phantom said.

Zero looked to X as well. "Neither of us said anything."

"Sorry," X replied. "I was talking with Rock." He was somewhat glad he didn't flush with embarrassment as a Cyber Elf. '_Phantom and Zero are both stuck on different encryption walls, but I think they'll be okay coming up,_' he said. '_Just give us a couple of minutes to get up there._'

The emotion Rock sent back over the link could only be described as pure, unfiltered 'yay!' He barely even registered that Zero and Phantom were stuck again and, instead, he said, '_Sure!_'

Rock's aura on the link was bouncing around now, doing some kind of happy dance as he waited (impatiently) for the three of them to come up.

"Hey, you two, check your egos for a minute. Rock's got something he wants us to go see."

Both units looked to X, but it was Zero that asked, "And Blues is okay with us being up there?"

"It'll be fine," X said, floating to his feet. "Rock asked for both of you, so I'm fairly certain Blues said okay."

It took a minute for Phantom to stop staring at his father. "Wait a minute. How are you on the network?"

"I'm not. The defense system Blues made for me serves as a communications link point for the two of them," X explained. "Now, let's go. I may be able to get upstairs in short order, but the two of you have to either take the lift or the ladders, so let's get a move on.

Zero reattached Phantom's handcuffs as they stood, X heading through the ceiling as Phantom and Zero left the room.

"Ladder would be faster," Phantom said as they walked down the hall. "Permission to go ahead?" he asked.

"Wouldn't the lift be easier, considering the cuffs?" Zero said, raising an eyebrow at Phantom.

"Not necessarily," the Guardian answered. Looking up the ladder, Phantom gauged the distance before engaging his boosters, jumping up the sides of the shaft until he came to a stop at the fifth floor. "You're the one that taught Father how to wall-jump," Phantom called down, waiting for Zero to follow. "At least, that's what he told me when he taught me how to do it."

Zero shrugged, calling up, "I haven't gotten that memory back if that's the case," before following Phantom's lead and quickly ascending. "So, let's see what your uncle found that's so interesting."


	20. Better Days

_We do try to cut the chapters in such a way that they're a reasonable length each time, though this one does fall slightly short. Of course, some do last far longer than our average length, so the chapters at least even out. _

_In this installment of Redemption, Rock shares a distant memory from a far happier time, the differences between Robot Masters and Reploids only become more apparent, and Phantom discovers a fun new hobby! _

…_Is that the 200k marker I see us hitting there? We're far from done, kids!_

_**Disclaimer: **Mega Man and all related characters and information are the property of Capcom Co., Ltd., Akira Kitamura and Keiji Inafune._

* * *

><p>In Rocinolle's lab, Rock was hugging Blues, or trying to, but Rock was bouncing too much for it to really be a hug and Blues had to lean down slightly to get him to quiet down some. When X, Phantom, and Zero came into the lab, Rock turned to look to them, eyes bright and smile wide. "Hello!"<p>

On the table beside him and Blues, there was a decent-sized mechaniloid with a yellow hard hat. It glanced at them once when they entered, then immediately ducked under its hat, hiding itself from the new, strange units that just entered. It made a beepy, purry sound and Rock reached out to it, touching its hard hat to coax it back out. "Sheridan, say hello!"

The Mettaur shifted and emerged from its hard hat just enough for its optics to focus on the three units, and it made another whirring, beeping noise, this time less alarmed and more…curious sounding, somehow.

"You got him working again," X said, his tone very pleased. "Who fixed what?" he asked.

"This is what you wanted to show us?" Phantom asked, leaning down a little to get to eye level with the mechaniloid.

X laughed. "This one's older than I am, Phantom," he explained. "It's quite a big deal it's active again."

"You found one of these in the city?" Zero asked, wondering where the little thing had come from.

"I did," Rocinolle answered, her voice quiet. "I don't mean to bring up negative things from our past, but do you recall an Order of Retirement against unit SM-94?"

Phantom's eyes went a little wide after a moment of scouring his memory files. "This is the unit you recovered?" The Guardian looked absolutely flabbergasted. "My sincerest apologies, Rocinolle," he said.

"It's…nothing to apologize for, Guardian Phantom. What's past is past."

"Well, yes, I wanted you to see this unit, but that's not what I wanted to show you," Rock said, still smiling widely. "When we…when we looked over its coding, Blues and I could tell right away whose Mettaur this was. It was one of our brothers'. It was Ice's. I…when I realized that, I unlocked a memory. That's what I wanted you to see."

"Ice?" X asked, looking down at the unit. "I…" he frowned. "I don't remember him." Another sibling? Was this one lost to him? If he was…X looked forward to this memory all the more if this was all he'd ever know of this elder child of Light.

Zero pointed between him and Phantom. "Okay, wait, I can get showing X because this…because Ice would have been his brother, but…" Zero motioned again, flipping his hand back and forth. "What does this have to do with us?"

Rock frowned at Zero and Phantom. "You're X's friend and Phantom…you're X's son. I…want you to see who they were." Rock fidgeted and looked away, suddenly self-conscious.

"There is one condition," Blues added. "I'm certain this will spark questions. All queries will be fielded by me." He didn't want anything to be asked of Rock, especially given what other memory files this particular one was undoubtedly linked to.

All four units in the room nodded in understanding, X sidling a little closer to Zero and Phantom.

Rock turned his attention to the holo-screen.

It flickered and the memory began playing.

* * *

><p>Rock was standing on the top of a very tall, steep hill, swathed in a thick blanket of fluffy snow. There were errant snowflakes floating lazily in the air and a distant, mechanical sound, like gears turning. Like machines running. Rock turned his head to look down the hill, and it was pure, untouched, white snow all the way down. But beyond the hill?<p>

It looked like _summer_. The kind of summer talked about in hand-me-down tales and bedtime stories. A forest of trees—deciduous trees, laden with leaves in a thousand shades of green—was laid out below them and beyond them, beyond the snow. Rock was peering down and the line where the snow ended was visible. When he glanced up, toward the sky, it was bright and sunny, with puffy clouds.

The snow wasn't coming from clouds. There were machines up there—mechaniloids up there, and they were _making it snow_. There was absolutely no way that it was cold enough for the snow to stick, but it was plenty thick already, and far more than an inch or two.

"There is no way that is safe," a voice said.

"It'll be fine—I've done this _tons_ of times before." This one sounded younger.

"I'm amazed that we haven't had to cart you back into the lab in _pieces_."

"No, look, it's safe, really. The snow's a foot deep already, we'll be fine."

There was a silence there from the first voice, a silence that somehow managed to sound completely disbelieving.

Rock knelt down to test the snow: it was fluffy and light and gave way easily under his blue gauntlet. "I think he's right. It's a good cushion." With that, Rock turned his head to look at the two that'd been speaking.

Two Robot Masters were standing there. One of them looked young, looked about Rock's age. His eyes were blue as well, but a much lighter, colder shade. He was dressed in a blue snowsuit with fluffy, white trim and smiling at Rock in approval. The other, however? He was looking down at the two of them like they'd completely _lost their minds_. He was much taller than either of them, standing at the height of an adult human by the looks of it. His armor was black and red, with a lightning bolt featured prominently on his chest. Physically, both Robot Masters looked a bit different from Reploids: their armor, especially the boots, didn't really resemble human clothing and on the taller one, there were two insulated tubes of wires running down either side of his neck. It was more than likely that under the parka, the smaller one had those, too.

"It'll be a race," the smaller one continued, still smiling. "We'll see who can get down to that tree," and he pointed, "first." Rock turned in the direction he pointed and there was a long silence.

"…Which tree?"

There was nothing but trees down there, as far as the eye could see.

After a moment, something flickered in Rock's vision. Two grids suddenly flickered into view, one colored light blue, like the smaller one's snowsuit, and the other one the same shade of red as the other's armor. Then, two more views of the base of the hill were imposed over Rock's, the three blending dizzyingly for several moments, the image shifting before forming a composite of all three, the grids unifying into one. The entire process didn't take more than two or three seconds.

"This tree," and with that, a bracket and icon appeared near one of the trees, in that light blue that seemed to represent the smaller one. "We'll race there."

An agreement must have been made silently, because the shared vision disengaged and Rock was left with the scene he'd started with, though the tree was still flagged.

"I've seen you play this game before," the taller said, frowning. "No way. _I'm_ not going back to be lectured, especially not right after extensive maintenance."

"I think you're too big for the Peng anyway."

That actually made the taller one startle. "_You're going to—_" he cut himself off and squeezed the bridge of his nose, as though staving off a headache.

X blinked for a moment, stepping forward. "That's Elec," he said suddenly, moving closer to the screen. "He was…one of the elders…DLN-008?" he asked, looking between Rock and Blues.

And the _Harmony_. X hadn't realized that his system would be able to pick up on that when it was an external feed, but there were so many tones, so many different songs reverberating over one another, like a symphony where all the musicians were playing their own songs and yet it all somehow just _melded._ '_This…_' he stammered over the link with both his siblings, '_this is…the Harmony…this is my family's Harmony?_'

"Yes. Ice was DLN-005," Blues replied. '_And yes. This is our Harmony,_' he answered over the link while Rock smiled all the wider. '_This is…an ideal sort of sound, don't you think?_' Much better than just two voices.

Rock had paused the feed when X spoke, but now he continued it.

"All you have to do is see which of us makes it first?" Ice asked.

Elec looked at Rock, helpless.

"I think it sounds fun," Rock chirped. His tone here, however, was confident, _wasn't_ shy or quiet the way they'd seen him be as a newbuilt.

"Yes! It is fun!" Ice said cheerily.

"Did you even get permission from Doctor Light to do this?" Elec gestured around at the snow. Seriously. He'd covered the hillside just so he could go sledding?

"He's down in maintenance on Bomb for at least another four hours." Ice waved Elec's concerns away with a dismissive gesture.

Another sigh. "I'll wait by the tree then." He'd have said that if something happens, it wouldn't be his fault, except it _would_. They'd all be responsible.

There was a soft warbling, chirping sound then, and Rock turned to look beyond the two Robot Masters. Two penguin mechaniloids were approaching. They waddled up to the one in the snowsuit first and he greeted them both before turning to Rock with a mischievous smile. "Once Elec is in place, I'll count from three. We'll start together."

The view bobbed as Rock nodded.

Elec passed the two of them then, looking down over the hillside, and then looking back to them, still doubtful. "I'll see you at the bottom."

And then he was _gone_. The snow his sudden movement kicked up obscured Rock's view and he laughed and covered his eyes. By the other's laughter, he'd had to do the same thing. The snow settled after a few moments and Rock brushed himself off, then looked down to the foot of the hill.

Even though it'd been a scarce few seconds, Elec was already down to the tree.

"Okay! Here, you take this one." One of the Pengs waddled over, then laid on its stomach, blinking between Ice and Rock expectantly. "Sit here—there you go. Hold on here, but don't mess with their flippers, it helps them steer. And don't let go. You'll go flying off if you do."

Rock looked down the hillside: the ground dropped off dramatically below them. It'd be a fast ride.

Ice appeared in Rock's peripheral vision, sitting on another of the mechaniloids—weren't they kind of heavy for that?-and he began counting down.

"Three…two…"

When he said one, both Robot Masters kicked off and went flying down the hillside. Rock had to close his eyes for a moment as snow was kicked up into his face, but he did a very good job of keeping them open. He and Ice were keeping together, but not coming so close as they might hit each other. They aimed for a bump on the hill and were sent sailing into the air. The view from here was breathtaking, even if Rock only had a few moments to glance around before focusing on the ground again. Another spray of snow washed up around him and Ice when they landed, the Peng units keeping their balance perfectly as they sped down the hillside.

The visual for the rest was chaotic as snow continued to kick up around them and, suddenly, Rock was off of the Peng and tumbling through the snow, laughing the entire time, not stopping even when he landed on his back, half-covered in snow.

"Rock!" Elec darted over, pulling Rock to his feet with one arm, dusting him off with the other. Ice was already up and was somehow standing on top of the snow, even without snowshoes. He was beaming and Rock was still giggling.

"Who won?" Ice tilted his head, even as the two Peng units pounced on him, making happy cheeping noises.

Elec smiled down at Rock. "Rock did."

Ice broke out into a broader smile and asked Rock, "Best two out of three?"

The memory became choppy and staticky before fading completely from the screen: the rest of the day was clearly still corrupted. Rock looked back to X, smiling widely.

X smiled in return, moving to Rock and hugging him. "Thank you," he said softly.

Zero nodded. "Thank you," he echoed. "Although I do have a question that precludes the asking of related questions." At this, he turned to Blues. "How do you want to go about fielding the questions, since none of us can link…well, since X is the only one that can link to you in a way where we're not just blabbing the questions out as we go?" He had enough of a bad experience with the question Ciel had provided and really didn't want a repeat of that little fiasco today.

'_You're welcome,_' Rock whispered back to X via their link, still smiling.

"Ah, yes, Phantom isn't connected to any of the networks." So he couldn't talk to Blues that way, and Blues was not tolerating the Guardian forging a more direct link with himself or Rock. Blues frowned slightly, quiet for a few moments, then, "The data pad," Blues said simply, taking the device from Rock and handing it to Rocinolle. "Each of you can write your questions down. And X can just ask via our connection." That was easy enough.

The notepad was passed back and forth between Phantom, Zero, and Rocinolle as each came up with new questions to ask.

While they were involved with that, X turned to Blues. '_The gridlines that popped up when they were determining which tree Ice had pointed out, what were those?_' In all his years, he'd never had a targeting peripheral work that way with anyone.

Blues nodded slightly. "X asked what the gridlines that popped up were." And then, as an afterthought, "And don't bother with erasing questions that were already addressed, I'll be able to sort them just fine. Rock and Elec were trying to determine which tree Ice was referencing, so they connected with Ice's visual processor and synced their vantage points into one image, then Ice marked the tree he wanted."

Phantom looked up from where he had been huddled over the data pad with the others. "Wait, visual processor? That wasn't a targeting system? I know our systems don't display like that either, but…"

Blues tilted his head to look to Phantom, frowning slightly for him not letting Blues actually filter it first. "No, that wasn't a targeting system at all. None of those protocols were even active. They linked directly into one of Ice's processors, directly into the portion that was sorting all data received from his optics, and from there, Ice created a visual cue that illustrated which tree he wanted. The grids were Rock, Ice, and Elec's systems syncing up with one another."

Zero quickly grabbed the data pad, highlighting a bit of text after making a quick correction, and handed the item to Blues. "Sorry," he said to the others as he turned to look at them.

The highlighted section of text read: _How does that unit have more than one processor, and what do you mean that they didn't have targeting systems active? They're combat models, aren't they, considering their applicable skillsets?_

Behind the sunglasses, Blues blinked. "Zero asked how Ice has more than one processor, and how it is they did not have targeting systems active when they're combat models."

Now Rock looked confused, but didn't say anything.

"All Robot Masters have multiple processors," Blues continued. "Two was the minimum, three was more standard. I understand that androids and Reploids are only built with one. That was so you would appear more humanlike. A Robot Master with only one processor would have been…severely debilitated. That unit would not have been able to fulfill its directives. And as for the targeting display…Ice and Elec were not combat models."

"But…" Zero stammered, pointing to the empty screen that had shown them the video, then to the data pad still in Blues' hand.

Silently, Blues handed the data pad back to Zero.

Zero highlighted another batch of text, realized that Phantom had a related question, and returned the data pad to Blues. _You're saying they're not combat models, but look at Elec's speed capabilities and Ice's degree of control not just over weather control and manipulation, but over his own interactions with the element as well. For a unit that's likely about the same weight, at least assuming as much because of height, as Rock, how are they not combat models? What kind of applications do they have if not that?_

Blues read the question aloud, then frowned for a few moments. "Their application is as _industrial units_. Elec was tasked with overseeing power plants, mainly nuclear ones, and Ice's responsibilities dealt with water purification and sustainment, particularly in the Antarctic Circle." Why did their capabilities mean they had to be for combat? It…were Reploid thought processes really so in line with humanity's?

Now Rock was frowning, leaning over to read what the data pad was saying as Blues answered the questions. His own thoughts mirrored Blues', but Rock actually voiced them. "Why…why do their capabilities mean they have to be combat units? Why does it have to be for something violent?" Instead of for something good, something innocent?

Zero and X _both_ looked absolutely shocked by Rock's question, but it was Zero who voiced his concern first. "Why _wouldn't_ they be built for combat? Even in your time, wasn't there the concern of something happening, of a unit going rogue?"

X nodded. "During the height of the Maverick Wars, ninety-two percent of all produced Reploids were armed and loaded with basic combat and survival protocols, as well as armaments ranging from buster cannons to hold-out pistols and melee weaponry. Seeing a unit designated outside of military service was nearly unheard of unless it was in a maintenance or social services position."

"Uprisings…weren't a concern for this model line." No, that became a concern _after_ the First Numbers. "Furthermore, this memory isn't from wartime," which was partly why Blues allowed Rock to show it, "and the planet wasn't at war. No one walked around with weaponry on their person; it was outright banned by the human government." Not that that stopped Doctor Wily. "Only law enforcement and similar services had armament."

"This is how it was before the Maverick Wars," Zero said quietly, and there was a hint of sorrow in his eyes.

Rocinolle stepped over to Blues, taking the data pad and jotting a quick note down before handing it back.

_If this is the way the world was before the Wars started in earnest, does that mean that the entire planet looked this lush back then? It wasn't just sporadic groupings of natural life occurring by chance or under the biodomes?_

"Rocinolle asked about the state of life on the planet, about the ecological health of the planet during this time period," Blues began, then paused. "This…the forest that you see in this memory file was part of Doctor Light's property." Which was why they could even do that without getting in trouble, "and there were no biodomes sustaining life in this time period. The flora and fauna needed no outside assistance. So, yes, the entire planet was lush to some degree, though some more than others. Organic life, however, pervaded every region, every corner. It would have been alarming then to see barren land, and efforts were made to find out why it was and what could be done to reverse it. There were models built to do just that. I could show you images from every continent, from dozens of countries, and it would largely resemble what you saw here." And now, the planet was a dying husk of its former self, wasn't it?

X looked up at Blues' last statement, fortifying their link. '_You traveled a lot, I would assume, if you have files like those._' He shook his head. '_The question that I have actually references something Elec and Ice were discussing. What was Elec asking if they'd gotten permission to do and why, and was…the name mentioned…was Bomb another one of our brothers?_'

Blues tilted his head, but instead of responding to the room at large, he responded over his link to X, supporting the fortification and reaching out some to X on his own. '_Yes, Bomb was our brother, too. He was DLN-006. And…Elec was asking Ice if he'd gotten permission to make the hill snowy, permission to take Rock out to go sledding, and permission to go sledding in the first place._' And by Ice's reaction, he hadn't bothered to inform the doctor of any of it. By that point, Doctor Light was used enough to his creations' quirks that he (probably) wouldn't have been overly alarmed, but still…

A Robot Master failing to ask permission for such a major change in a day's itinerary, especially with units that weren't its subordinate robots? There were plenty of humans that would have been more than a little unsettled by that.

Phantom spoke up then. "Blues-dono, may I have the data pad?"

Nodding slightly, Blues handed the data pad to Phantom.

He selected a batch of text, handing the item back. "Could I ask that myself?" he asked.

Blues read it over quickly and nodded. "That's fine."

Phantom nodded before looking at Rock. "I noticed that you and Ice were about the same height, so I'd guess that he was about a hundred kilos, like you, maybe more considering the outfit he was wearing and that I can't really tell from a picture how much someone weighs. That considered, wouldn't it be…uncomfortable for the Pengs to carry someone that heavy?" He smirked. "And that looked like it was a lot of fun. I've…I've never actually been sledding," and that took into consideration the seasonal cycles that existed beneath the Eden Dome because of the climate control system.

"No, it wasn't uncomfortable to them. Honestly, they could have supported _Elec's_ weight, except he's so tall, so it'd have been uncomfortable to him," Rock broke out into a big smile, "and he hated doing undignified things." Like sledding on a Peng. "It _was_ a lot of fun. I…don't remember it, but I feel like Ice liked to play games like that a lot," and Rock turned to look up to Blues for confirmation. He smiled when the elder Robot Master nodded. "But he wouldn't do it if it would hurt the robots, even if they weren't his."

"Speaking of sledding," Zero said, "Blues, the bottom of the list is another question of mine about Ice."

"It was…July when this memory was recorded," Blues began, pausing only to verify the month from Rock's systems. "Ice was built for cold-weather environments, yes, though he also didn't overheat easily." His structure really accounted for that possible weakness. "Ice was using his own abilities combined with the support of his subordinate units to cordon the area off. One of his abilities was to affect the flow of energy in substances around him, particularly to remove heat energy from an area. He effectively caused such a drop in pressure in the area that the temperature became akin to winter, held it that way, then pulled moisture in and froze it to create the precipitation." And Blues didn't want to get any deeper into the technological aspect of that.

Zero and Phantom both whistled appreciatively at that. The sheer amount of technological know-how to pull a stunt like that…and Zero's eyes went wide. "And he was the fifth of the line? What were the _later_ models like if he was able to do something of that magnitude?" Zero stopped suddenly, looking like a deer caught in headlights. "Sorry. It just hit me what that kind of control would imply for the overall application of Robot Master technology, and that's…we _never_ had anything quite like that."

"We only just managed to develop a working climate control system during the construction of the Eden Dome and Neo Arcadia. To see a _single unit_ pull that off when we still have to knock the bugs out every now and again," and X didn't even want to think about what Copy X had done there, "is…impressive, to say the least."

'_There are a lot more negative implications popping up in my head that I'm not about to voice,_' he admitted to Blues. '_To be built with these kinds of capabilities, I can…_' X froze, though he was able to keep his apprehension from showing on his face.

Blues chose not to respond to either Zero or X, chose not to encourage their trains of thought, particularly X's. Rock was inspecting the Mettaur again, looking it over once more just to be sure it was really okay, even as the little unit reached out to the young Robot Master curiously, querying why Rock felt just a little bit stressed.

'_Blues,_' X said, having suddenly realized a very pronounced difference in their brother's character, '_why is it that you…you don't treat Rock the same way Elec and Ice were. They were acting more like brothers or close friends, playmates rather than protectors. Why is it that you're…_' the way you are?

'_You're thinking in terms of human relationships again,_' Blues responded, '_but regardless of what you call it, the feeling is the same._' A brother was still a brother, Blues supposed. Or at least the emotional bond was what it was regardless of its name.

'_You heard Rock say that during the wars, it was him alone fighting. He was not exaggerating. By the time I…encountered Rock for the first time, he…_' Blues paused, trying to think of a way to explain it that X would understand. '_He was socialized by Doctor Light, as a human child. He thought half in human terms, alien and clumsy as they were to him, and when the wars started, he volunteered to fight. Doctor Light should never have permitted it. He was sending Rock out to behave as a Robot Master, and not a subservient one, when all Rock knew was human socialization and being the child in every situation. He would not have been able to continue indefinitely. He did not know how to function the way he needed to. He did not know how to communicate with them. He needed guidance, and not the kind Doctor Light could ever provide. That is what I did provide to him._'

When Blues did meet Rock, he not only trained Rock in how to fight, but also in how to assert himself among Robot Masters, among hostile units. He taught Rock how to exist in their constantly-fluctuating social structure, how to hold his place and not be swept away by the cascade of challenges. By establishing Rock as a unit subservient to him, he not only gave Rock extra insurance—the Robot Masters understood that challenging Rock was inviting Blues to the fracas—but he also gave Rock a real starting point to move from. Even if Rock never completely detached himself from Blues.

'_I'm…I'm sorry,_' X said. He really didn't understand things outside of his own experiences, his own way of functioning, though once he was provided the structure, he could at least make sense of the perspective. '_And not just for this, for misunderstanding,_' X continued. '_I've been stepping very far out of line with you this past week, trying to be someone in charge when I don't have, can't have, that authority. I'm not…I'm not questioning you, and I'm not faulting you for anything, but…_' X sighed, audibly, leaning back against his own energy, floating just a small bit above the floor.

"X, you okay?" Zero asked.

"I'm fine," X lied.

'_You didn't know,_' Blues simply said. The same way that humans never knew. Frustrating as it was for him, he was used to it. '_I have the benefit of…knowing how humans think, and a large portion of their thought process applies to an android like you because you were made to be more humanlike than us. I have similar experience, you do not._' X was gaining that experience right now, as they spoke. '_I will try to explain what I can, though I expect it is…alien to you, especially after existing so long as you have._' Blues understood why X was thinking the way he had been, even if that didn't stop Blues from bristling. '_Rock and I…we are getting to know you the same way you are getting to know us._' And given the situation? Of course they were butting heads. '_I hoped that Rock's memory would provide you with more context._'

'_It has, and spending time with Rock provides it as well, since he's a little more…social than you are. It's just that seeing this, but also knowing what he went through, realizing that he technically had it harder than I did when I held my own life as this horrid example of just how full of shit life can get…and I'm left being more annoyed by the decisions made in your time than I am by my own._' That Rock was forced _by law_ to fight alone? '_Who, in their right minds, sees a robot that looks so much like a child, so innocent, and deems him the only one allowed to fight? Human law forbade the application for military service to any human under the age of majority, and yet my own brother gets booted to the forefront of the war efforts? Sure, he's got memories like this, but he unlocked something last night,_' something terrible, '_and I can't…_' Now X's frustration was starting to bleed into his physical expressions.

"X, whoa," Zero said, seeing the way that X's body language was starting to lock up, the way he'd shut down before a full-blown rant, and at the thought, another memory file hit the top of his repair queue. "_X_," Zero stressed, moving to his friend and wrapping his arms gently around the Cyber Elf. "What's wrong?"

X almost let his anger win out, almost let himself remerge with Cyberspace and just leave the situation behind, let it and him defuse. "I'll be fine," X said, forcing himself to focus on the memory that Rock had shared with them and trying not to think that Blues was _really_ trying to hide something from him, something about their past that would just make all these scattered pieces of nonsensical data fit together and form the bigger picture he knew he was missing.

Rock reached out over his link with X, strengthening it and weaving worry and reassurance through it. He was weaving love through it, affirming that, yes, X was someone important to Rock, and to see him so upset? He shouldn't be so sad. What was wrong? Nothing was hurt, so what was wrong? The memory didn't make X said, he was happy to see it, so what…?

Blues also reached out, but he didn't need to ask why X was so upset. He sent his own reassurance, reminded X's systems that regardless of what happened in the past, he and Rock were here and whole. '_Part of why Rock was so upset last night was his own lack of context. The memory was incomplete and…like having to taste only the bitter with none of the sweet._' Only the sad with none of the happy. '_On the whole, he will have more happy memories than sad ones._' And Blues would much rather that the memories Rock made here were happy ones, too.

'_I…I just…_' X looked to Blues, and while he accepted Rock's affectionate feelings through their link, X was careful to keep this conversation between just him and his eldest brother. '_You know, last night, when Rock wanted to go see Zero and Phantom, we…we walked in on the end of the Elf Wars story I told my kids. I could tell that Rock, at some level, remembered the concept of bedtime stories, but…_' His eyes betrayed all the confusion screaming through his mind. '_I was trying to think, the whole time I was in Cyberspace, of a story I could tell him, something that I was sure he'd enjoy…and they're _all_ war stories, Blues. I am grateful beyond words to see this, but I…how do I tell Rock stories of my own life when he starts asking, tell him what life was like for me, when it's been nothing but battle?_' X really didn't like making Rock sad, and all his own memories would do is exacerbate the issue.

'_You're right that Rock doesn't like fighting, but he understands that some kinds of fighting can be necessary. He understands maintenance, and he understands that, sometimes, when people don't get along, all they can do is fight._' It was a sad lesson to have to learn from his own brother. '_And while he'll be…sad that your life has been just fighting, that's no reason not to share it with him. It'll just make him want to show you more memories like the one you just saw. It'll make him want to make memories like those with you._' So X would have some good bedtime stories to tell.

'_It shouldn't just be about the wars, though,_' X said. '_I want to do what I can to make sure that the life you have now, the lives you'll be allowed to lead with us, are as good as they can possibly be, but…_' There was something inherently wrong with realizing that he'd been fighting for so long that he wasn't sure he'd be able to stop when the time finally came to lay down his arms for good.

'_If that's the case, then isn't it better to look forward instead of back?_' Looking toward a bright future instead of dwelling on how much the past _sucked_?

'_It is,_' X said with a sigh that shuddered across their link, and X started sending reciprocal hugs towards Rock, weaving what he could of his joy and affection for the older robot into his signal.

Even if that signal was still tinged with a hint of sadness.

"Uncle Rock," Phantom said, a little unsure of himself, but seeking to break the silent tension that was starting to suffocate the room, "when we get Neo Arcadia back, do you want to go sledding with me first chance we get during the winter cycle?"

Rock lit up immediately and his link with X immediately cheered, his hugs becoming more insistent as he hoped it was helping the android feel better, even if Rock didn't know what was wrong. He thought that X was probably talking to Blues, and X was calming down now, so hopefully Blues fixed whatever was bothering him. Rock looked over to Phantom with excited eyes and a big smile. "Yes! Let's all go sledding! We'll have to make sure the snow's right for it, though."

"Question," Zero said, perking up at Phantom's idea, though he didn't let go of his tenuous hold on X. "Does sledding snow and snowball fight snow…is it the same kind?" Zero remembered vague images of snowball fights with the Hunters during one winter between wars, but sledding? He'd never done that, either, as far as he was aware.

"No. Sledding snow had to be light and fluffy, so it needs to be fresh. If it sits in the sun and gets a little heavier, you can pack it and make snowballs. So after sledding? If you can hold it in your hands," and Rock gestured here, "and form it into anything, if it doesn't just fall apart, it's snowball snow."

Rocinolle piped up, finally having recovered from the overwhelming realization that the world she knew outside of the Eden Dome wasn't always barren. "Why was Bomb undergoing maintenance? Did something happen to his auto-repair function?"

Rock blinked. "Auto-repair function?"

"Nothing happened to Bomb's auto-repair. The nanites that Reploids use were developed alongside X. None of the Robot Masters were 'upgraded' to make use of nanites due to…time constraints and the massive systems overhaul that would be necessary in each unit." They'd have needed new programming to deal with the nanites, a complete redesign, and new bodies for each individual. It'd need to not interfere with their current capabilities or minds, and it'd need to be done on an individual basis; there would have been no quick-fix patch for it.

"So you had to be taken apart for even the most basic repairs?" Rocinolle was astounded. "That had to be terribly inconvenient, both for you and your technicians." She looked at Rock and Blues curiously. "Were you able to do repairs for each other when your technicians weren't available, or was that something that wasn't the norm?"

"Yes, we were able to repair one another when the need arose," Blues said. He did the repairs on Rock, after all. Granted, he was originally lab support too, and Rock's design was nearly identical to his own, but the other First Numbers would have been able to get Rock back up to operational status, even if not so swiftly as he.

The room fell silent for a long moment, each of the units trying to figure out if they had anything else to ask, Phantom and Rocinolle replaying their memory files to view the video again when Zero blurted out, "Hey, I just got a message from Cerveau. I hate to cut this short," and there was an apologetic look cast towards Rock, "but I need to head upstairs. Phantom?"

The Shadow Guardian nodded, moving over to Zero. "Remind me about sledding when we're back in Neo Arcadia, Uncle Rock. I really want to try that some day."


	21. Evidence of Tampering

_Apologies for the late update. My allergies are doing a good job of impersonating a severe head cold and it knocked me on my butt. Midnyght's computer is still out of commission, but never fear! I have quite a few chapters ready for your reading pleasure in the meantime._

_Anyway, in this installment of Redemption, we begin to see why Neo Arcadia is such a mess, Phantom braves a direction connection to the eldest of the Robot Masters, and Ciel finds out that the government official that assigned her to the project that birthed Copy X wasn't very official at all._

* * *

><p>Milan knocked on the doorframe to the lab. "Hey, Doc, you busy?"<p>

Cerveau turned from the data he was sorting on his terminal, slightly surprised to see Milan and Ciel at his lab. "No, not at the moment. What's wrong?"

"Nothing's wrong," Ciel replied, stepping into the room. "I wanted to talk to you about the files you've been sending me, the ones of Master Zero's memory repair logs."

"I mentioned to Ciel that Master Zero's systems look like they're defragmenting, as if they're pulling the least damaged files and repairing them," Milan said, "and we wanted to see if his auto-repair system logs showed any repair focus on his processor."

"His auto-repair? Now that you mention it, his auto-repair system was damaged during his startup as well, but by his scans, that repaired itself, too. Which is…" For a Reploid's auto-repair to repair itself? Unheard of. Cerveau was astounded and honestly, it was exciting in a way.

"Wait, his auto-repair fixed _itself_?" Ciel was absolutely amazed by that detail. "You…all you did was provide new nanites, right?" He'd not asked Zero to undergo any sort of diagnostic or maintenance, and that had worried her. But now? "Is there any way that we could get Master Zero up here so that I could get his repair and diagnostic logs for analysis and comparison?"

"I can call him up, though Guardian Phantom would be coming, too." Of course, since Phantom was in Zero's custody. After a few moments, Cerveau nodded. "They'll be along in a minute."

Ciel looked over to the bank of charger pods, eyeing them for a moment before turning to the medic. "Cerveau, how much longer do the programmers have before they're ready to exit hibernation?"

"Mmm…" Cerveau hummed, glancing back at the line of charger pods. "Maybe fifteen or twenty minutes left on the recharge cycle. I gave them another round of nanites before they start their boot cycles, just to be sure. Judging by their readouts, it's been a good, long while since they've had a full recharge cycle, never mind the state of their auto-repair systems."

"I can't imagine what it's been like for them," Milan said. "How bad off were their systems when they came in?"

"They were at death's door. Their systems were being starved…if this is how the programmers are faring, I really hate to think how it's become for Reploids in general in Neo Arcadia." Cerveau shook his head slightly.

"Hold on," Milan said, shocked, "starved? They…were they…" He could barely wrap his head around the concept. "Were they being denied basic nanite resupply as well as access to their chargers?" And not just nanite injections like they'd get twice a year (or more often, if it were necessitated), but their raw material supplements as well? "What is Copy X thinking? The city is going to shut down without the Reploid half of the population. We make up the entire workforce until the human population can restabilize!"

"I can't even begin to fathom what Copy X could be thinking, but yes. All of their system functions were…I don't think they've had a proper charge in weeks. Their nanite supplies were alarmingly low, along with their raw material reserves. Guardian Phantom had to carry one halfway here, and after checking his health…" Cerveau shook his head, clearly disgusted with the condition of the programmers, clearly disgusted with Neo Arcadia and Copy X.

"Raw material supplements have been rationed out to once every four months, and charge cycles to two hours every other day, unless you're looking to get retired for straining the resources. The…the higher-ups, however, those like myself and my siblings, the Judges, and the army lieutenants, are not subjected to the same restrictions, but we are warned to keep our requests for supplies and charge as minimal as possible just to ensure the 'stability' of the city," Phantom said as he and Zero walked into the room. "And four days out in the desert did not bode well for any of their systems, compromised as they already were. I'm just glad we didn't lose anyone on the way here." Phantom looked to Cerveau, obviously worried. "The one that I brought in, the one in hibernation, how is he looking?"

Cerveau paused by that unit's charger, checking his stats over again. "He's already received two nanite injections, and I don't think he'll need a third, but I'm going to keep an eye on him just in case. He should feel a lot better now that he has a full charge and some supplies in his systems."

"That is a comforting thought," Phantom said, tilting his head as he looked over the pods. "What about their names? How long will it be before they're assigned names?"

Zero pulled Phantom a bit, tugging on his arm to silence him. "Cerveau, you called me up here for something?"

"Lady Ciel will name them once she decides on good names," Cerveau said with a smile before turning to Zero. "Yes, I did. From the data you've given me, it seems that your auto-repair system has repaired itself, which is unheard of in Reploids," and would be very useful to replicate, Cerveau thought, "so I'd like your repair and diagnostic logs from that system for analysis, if you don't mind."

Zero nudged Phantom toward one of the nearby chairs before vaulting onto the nearest table. "Get me a link-up to one of the computers and I'll set the copies to download," Zero said, taking the offered cable from Cerveau once the medical officer pulled one of the smaller terminals over to him. "It's going to take a minute, since my systems tend to be a little…or a _lot_ detailed in their scans." Zero had long ago learned to ignore most of the minutiae in those logs, but he'd give full copies if something in them would prove useful. Plugging the cable into his neck, he verified the link before looking to Cerveau. "Is there a time frame you need me to focus on?"

Phantom dropped wordlessly into the chair, closing his eyes as he focused back on the encryption layer he'd been stuck on earlier.

"Just everything from the time you woke in Neo Arcadia to today so we don't' miss anything," Cerveau said, moving to the terminal and inputting something before nodding. "Whenever you're ready."

Zero laid back against the table, closing his eyes as he selected the batch of files, and he let out a soft breath as he initiated the file copy. A peripheral popped up, informing him that the transfer was going to take at least fourteen minutes. In the meanwhile…

Careful to keep from alerting the unit currently wearing the handcuffs, Zero initiated a wireless data transfer into the control mechanism on the cuffs, authorizing a system overwrite as he supplied a completely different locking program into the control mainframe.

"Are your memories returning more frequently now, or is the pace remaining steady?" Cerveau asked as he watched the upload process. Fourteen minutes…by that time, the programmers would be finished, too.

It was as if Zero hadn't heard the question, the android remaining silent, resting against the table as if he'd fallen asleep.

"…Zero?" Cerveau nudged Zero's shoulder gently, his brow furrowing with concern at Zero's lack of response.

Zero's brow furrowed, and he cracked one eye open, verifying the file overwrite before opening the other eye. "What?"

"I asked you if your memories are returning more frequently than when they first began restoring," Cerveau said, frowning. "Did something happen? You didn't hear me the first time I asked."

"They're…they're coming in a little more frequently," Zero replied, "though the file length isn't nearly as long as some of the earlier files I repaired." He looked down a bit and blinked at the medic's other question before answering, "I was just looking over a few of the files I have gotten back. It's odd still being out of place about who I am with memories as old as the ones I have."

Cerveau nodded: he could only imagine. "You'll feel more comfortable as more and more recover," and Cerveau certainly hoped that they all would. "Though let me know right away if anything changes."

"I will," Zero replied.

"You mentioned that they've been coming back a bit more. Are most of them triggered or restored during hibernation?" Ciel asked, walking closer to the table he was on.

"Most of them are still in hibernation, and it seems like my systems are focusing more on the memories that weren't during the times I was on active duty. I'm getting a lot of satellite files as well, audio and visual logs or documents that have to relate with older memory files, but nothing really focusing on any of the Maverick Wars. I've gotten a few of the actual fights back, as well as the entire final battle of the Elf Wars," and that memory was one he had shared with Phantom the night before. "Past that," and he shrugged. "I'd provide copies of that, too, but I'd be plugged up for a good chunk of the day and I'm not certain seeing the files themselves would be all that helpful to your research."

Cerveau nodded: as interesting as Zero's memories would be, it wasn't the memories themselves they needed data on, it was the method by which the memories were restored.

"What about the memory of Uncle Rock's you unlocked last night?" Phantom asked. "Would that be relevant?"

Ciel shrunk back a little at the thought of the progenitor unit, or his elder brother, having to come up to the lab for _anything_.

"You unlocked one of Master Rock's memories?" Cerveau perked up at that: he'd heard the broadcast along with the rest of the base, even if he wasn't one of the ones gossiping incessantly about it. Zero had none of his memories, so Rock fared better with his twenty-three percent, though Cerveau suspected that Rock lost more than just the majority of his memory files to be reduced to newbuilt status so completely.

Zero looked as if Cerveau had just said he'd kicked someone's puppy. "I didn't mean to," honest. "It's just that, last night, X and Rock stopped by the room, and we got to talking about the Elf Wars, since Phantom had been telling me one of the stories X used to tell him. We got to talking about the fact that X lost track of me because the team that was supposed to be analyzing me decided I was better off dead and abandoned me in that lab. It triggered something of Rock's memory files, something about one of the wars he fought and how the ones he fought against had been reprogrammed and forced to fight, to kill, despite their original purposes being so benign." He looked to Ciel and Milan for a moment before turning back to Cerveau. "And why did no one bother telling me that Dark Elf is my daughter?"

Cerveau met Zero's gaze through his goggles. "It wasn't my place to tell you, especially not with your memory files as they were, and are. You have a lot to absorb as it is, so I thought it best to see what pace your processor sets on your memory files and let Master X field any questions you have about your past, given that he, out of all of us, is best suited to answer them."

"I guess you're right," Zero mused, "though I really would have liked to have _not_ randomly stumbled across that realization."

"You said Master Rock knew others, _fought_ others, that had been reprogrammed? How is that possible?" Milan looked absolutely flabbergasted, turning to look to Ciel. "For anything of that magni…" and he drifted off, eyes flitting towards the door.

"For anything close to a reprogramming attempt, since Reploids can't be," Ciel said, ignoring Milan's gaze, "it would require a full corruption of whatever data was being targeted for change and then installing new specifications and coding and hoping that they'd stick instead of being outright rejected by the unit's own systems."

"I'm shocked that it hasn't occurred to you that Reploids did not exist in that time period," Blues' voice deadpanned from the doorway to the lab. He'd stopped there when he heard the direction the conversation had taken. Rock was leaning into Blues' side again, his arms wrapped around Blues' shield arm as he looked to the ones in the room curiously.

Ciel spun on her heels, eyes going wide as she let out a startled meep, taking a half-step back towards Milan. Were the doorway a viable option for her at that moment, she would have bolted back to her room, Milan tailing her or not, but with the two Robot Masters currently blocking her way out, she settled for moving away from them, her eyes darting to the floor so she wouldn't have to actually _see_ the taller unit staring a hole _through_ her.

Blues took a moment to look over Ciel and Milan before turning his attention to Cerveau, even as Rock's gaze wandered over everyone in the lab. "The programmer units brought in yesterday are about due for their recharge cycles to end, yes? I want to look over the coding sets they brought with them for the Pantheons, Golems, and Emergency Response Protocols."

"I have copies if you'd like," Phantom offered. "Had I known you wanted them earlier, I could have saved you the trip."

"That'll work," and there was a bit of an audible shrug in Blues' voice: it didn't matter which unit provided the data so long as it was transferred to him. He leaned against the doorframe, Rock leaning into his side contentedly. "X's description of how they reacted on the surface is…worrisome." And the First Law was angry that Blues took this long to address it. "I'd like to address that. If that can be rectified, it will make any future raids on Neo Arcadia that much safer."

"I'm sure that my siblings and the Judges would be appreciative. Well," Phantom amended, "at least Judges Foxtar, Mantisk, and Kelverian would. Inarabitta and le Cactank, maybe. The others?" He shrugged. "If you want to wait for the programmers to come online, that's fine," he offered. "I'm not sure how I'd be able to provide the data, seeing as I'm not on the comm net yet."

"Do you have the same port types X did on his original body?" Blues' gaze was cemented on Phantom now, head tilted slightly, considering.

"I have all three, yes, though I'm not sure how…" What did that have to do with his comm net access? Or lack thereof, as the case was.

"X was built to be able to interface with the Robot Masters to an extent. He had at least one port that was compatible with us, should we be unable to interact wirelessly and X need something." Blues' tone wasn't exactly sharp, but he was frowning in that way that meant that someone wasn't getting it when they should be.

Phantom frowned. "I…I wasn't aware of that, though Father never really explained why the four of us were built with a port that no other unit was designed with." That, at least, filled in that little gap in his understanding. He got to his feet, approaching Rock and Blues, turning around once he'd neared the pair and craning his head down to expose the ports.

Blues pulled a bundled cord from his trench coat pocket, unwinding it and slipping one end into his own port as he spoke to Phantom. "I'll warn you now, I won't feel like a Reploid once we're linked." He didn't want Phantom startling or anything, especially not when they were linked up: it _hurt_ to have a cord yanked.

Phantom nodded. "I'll…try to keep that in mind," he said, hands fisting loosely in the cuffs.

Rock disentangled one of his arms from Blues' and took Phantom's hand quietly: there wasn't a reason to be nervous. Blues was really nice and now Phantom would see.

With that, Blues opened the port and slid the cable in. It took only a moment's work to establish the connection and query Phantom's systems. Blues would admit that linking to the Guardian was still less than ideal, but he'd displayed only kindness toward Rock, even when Blues wasn't there, and with this link, he'd have a better feel for who Phantom was, even if the Reploids were nigh unreadable compared to Robot Masters.

Phantom's eyes went wide as the connection was verified, and he suddenly felt very small inside his own head, as if he'd been shunted to a small section of his personality matrix, even though he retained control over the entire system. It was a little overwhelming, and the hand that Rock was holding tightened a little.

Searching for an access focus, as Phantom had prior experience with wired and wireless connections with other Reploids, he was startled to find that he couldn't pin down where Blues actually _was_ to send a link confirmation. '_Uncle Blues,_' he asked a bit nervously, '_where is your access point focused at? I'm trying to establish link confirmation for data transfer, but I can't…I can't find you._'

'_We do not have an access point the way Reploids do. X could not find me at first, either._' Blues seemed mildly amused by that, like it was endearing and somehow, the amusement itself was communicated, brushed against Phantom almost to the point that he experienced the emotion for himself. Blues coalesced his focus near Phantom's access point, in plain view, still not making a move so as not to startle the Reploid. This'd been disorienting for X, so he expected it to be the same for the others.

Phantom nodded, finally able to sense where Blues was, and he sent a link confirmation to his uncle. '_Where there any other files you wanted, or would you just prefer access to my memory databanks?_' The time Blues had spent in Neo Arcadia had not been positive in any way for the Robot Master, so perhaps if Phantom provided images, files, of the world before his father's replacement had been put into power, it would help the elder robot see that the world hadn't always been what he'd awoken to find.

'_The databanks will be fine,_' Blues responded, pulling Phantom along a bit via the link, guiding him through it now, trusting that he'd have the sense to watch and learn. '_If you send transfer requests to the same place you verified the link, I'll be able to receive file transfers,_' but Blues was already accessing Phantom's memory databanks, querying for permission and being permitted deeper into the Reploid's mind.

'_I wouldn't know what to ask for,_' Phantom admitted, feeling the Robot Master rifling through his memory files, and he smiled at some of the earliest memories that were being queued to copy. '_Since I'm the baby of the family, you'll get a good idea of what your other nephews and your niece are like if you focus on the first ten to fifteen years._' After that, they'd be reassigned to military duty, and Phantom was sure Blues wouldn't be as interested watching that. After a moment, he tried to block any of the data files from the last four years from Blues, save for selecting the file of his argument with Copy X and initiating that to transfer as well.

Blues accepted the transfer for the argument with Copy X. Phantom's attempt at blocking the years with the Copy were…was he trying to shield Blues? From what, the truth? He didn't argue it though, let Phantom set up his little firewalls, and stayed corralled where the Reploid wanted him to be.

In all honesty, had Blues still been more…had his intentions not been so honest, Phantom would find himself in a very precarious position about now. As it was, Blues took only what Phantom was alright with him taking.

From the memory banks, at any rate. Blues didn't know how okay Phantom would be with him copying all of Phantom's programming code, but that's why Blues didn't ask for permission to take that.

'_I can take the Neo Arcadian coding files too,_' Blues pointed out, still rifling through Phantom's early memories. '_I can download from multiple databases at once,_' so two or even twelve transfers from within the same database was a cakewalk.

Phantom was quick to select the data, sending the transfer request to Blues. '_That's the coding for all three sets. There's a few different versions, but each of the files has been tagged with what unit it was extracted from and who the coder was._' Phantom would have to make sure to reassign the names on those files with the new names Ciel would provide. And at that, "Lady Ciel," he said, bowing his head a bit, "when you determine names for the programmers, would you please let me know what they are so that I can reset some of my internal data for them," including the identification tags his systems had for them.

Ciel only barely glanced up at the Guardian before nodding. "I will," she said meekly.

Rock was glancing at Ciel curiously, but he didn't stare, didn't want to make her even more uncomfortable. Rock squeezed Phantom's hand to reassure him. And then Rock noticed Phantom's cuffs. And the lock on them. A nice, easy little lock. But…wasn't that_ his_ lock program? Did X put that on there? No, X was too nice for that.

That was kind of a mean prank, wasn't it? Did Phantom even know how to break it? At least it was half broken open already, so it should be easy for Phantom to finish cracking.

'_Thank you,_' Blues said, deftly organizing the files on his own end and tagging them according to his own identification system. '_Is that everything?_' Because if it was, then Blues could disengage from the link and get to work analyzing this code…and Phantom's.

'_Unless there's something you still want or haven't finished downloading,_' and Phantom's queue was empty, '_then yes._'

'_You should be more careful,_' Blues added as he withdrew back into his own mind, files nicely packed in their own subfolder. '_I may be an 'uncle' to you, but you barely know me and we did not meet under favorable circumstances. Supposed I'd still held ill intent toward you? You let me right through what mental defenses you do have._' And, really, those firewalls were the effective ones. Once inside, Blues could have done whatever he'd felt like. '_Do not think that your inability to be reprogrammed makes you immune to mental attacks. There are other ways to destroy data._'

Phantom tried to keep from reacting to that information, but he did tense up a little, clutching to Rock's hand, and he bowed his head. '_I understand, uncle,_' he said, '_I…I am sorry that I did not think of that, but now that I know, I will take considerations from here on out._' It was odd to think that he had to protect himself from family, but if Blues felt it was necessary to make that point, he would respect and acknowledge it.

Blues nodded both over the link and in person, then cut their connection. Gently, he reached up to Phantom's port and disengaged the plug's locking mechanism and pulled it from the Guardian's port, then did the same with his own. "I'll begin my analysis of this data," and he had to slide his arm from Rock's to wind the cord back up, "and we'll see where the bad code is." Like a walk in the park: there was no if, no maybe, and no uncertainty about it. He was absolutely confident that he'd see it and Rock smiled up to him, now grasping the side of his coat.

Zero groaned a little as he pushed himself up from the table, disengaging the cable from his port. "Download's finished," he said, "and I apologize in advance for how insanely detailed my logs are. My systems are a bit…obsessive about details, so you're going to be muddling through a lot of those reports."

"I noticed that when you were in the charger and your systems were repairing, it posted repair logs to the pod's display screen." Seriously, it was as though the movements of each nanite was meticulously logged and posted. Every fiddly and seemingly superfluous detail presented on Zero's logs. Cerveau knew it'd take a lot longer to go through, but really, it was smart that Zero's systems were so anal about it: more data meant an easier diagnosis, provided you knew what it all _meant_.

Snatches of conversation flitted out to the hallway as X approached, trying to figure out just where his brothers had gone off to and wondering why they had left Rocinolle's lab in the first place. Seeing both Robot Masters in the doorway, X moved through the wall, looking to the gathered units when he cleared the other side. "Okay, what did I miss?"

Rock immediately brightened, reaching out to X with one hand, his fingers flitting into X's arm a bit, that staticky feeling registering in his systems. "Blues got copies of the programming those Reploids brought from the city," Rock said, still focused on X's unique nature and how novel the tingly sensation was. "So we'll know why they were hurting people," Rock glanced back at Blues at that statement, smiling when the older unit nodded shortly.

_That's good,_ X thought, realizing what a mess of Blues' systems the First Law was likely making. "It'll help when we take back the city, too, since we'd be able to patch the update before we move in." He looked to Blues for confirmation.

"I'll issue it as an order from high up within the city's bureaucracy; they'll implement it themselves," Blues agreed, his head tilted, already delving into the coding sets, reading it over. "Once that is patched, they won't be firing randomly on citizens. Of course, it'll be easiest overall to order them to lay down their arms." To sit down and be quiet while those above them fought for dominance.

Which could be provided by X Hacking some of the senior units, since reprogramming wasn't an option and it'd be easier to filter down commands by affecting the senior officer of the response team. "That won't be much of an issue either," X supplied. "I think my bigger concern is providing an overwrite if it turns out that the units themselves have been recoded somewhere," which was going to prove far worrisome if X was right, seeing as even Pantheons had basic reprogramming protections.

Another wall had fallen in the lock program that Zero had been working on during the file transfer, the android finally getting himself unstuck and managing to get two layers further in before the program fed him another hard-to-crack firewall. Linking into Phantom's cuffs, Zero quickly undid the two encryption walls he had figured out, wondering idly if Phantom had even noticed that the cuff's program had been changed.

Rock's eyes widened when Zero undid two of the encryption layers on Phantom's cuffs. Zero did that? That was…that was so mean! Rock looked to Zero with wide eyes, looking like he was both upset_ and _admonishing the ex-Hunter.

"Considering the….ah, 'security' in Neo Arcadia, it's won't be an issue at all," Blues replied to X, glancing down at Rock and querying him about why he was suddenly a little bit upset. Wait, Zero _what_? And Phantom_ didn't notice_? Blues accepted a copy of the lock program from Rock, quickly inspecting it. Well, the locks were easy, so there shouldn't be a problem, right?

Rock wasn't so sure: it was taking them a _long_ time to break each encryption layer.

Zero was sorely tempted to duck his head a little when Rock looked at him. While it seemed that Phantom was still completely unaware of the change to the handcuffs, Rock had definitely noticed. Opting to try for a change of topic, Zero saw the way X's right eye was colored, remembered what that indicated, and turned to Blues. "Blues, a quick question. The security program you provided for X—is that something that's specifically for him because he's a Cyber Elf?"

The question _had_ been burning at the back of his mind for a while.

Blues considered Zero for several long moments before speaking. "No, that wasn't the only reason I provided it, though his current condition did make it considerably more urgent that he receive and install it."

"Wait, install?" Zero said, actually getting to his feet at that. "I was with X when we started training for the 17th Elite. He couldn't just _install_ whatever programs he needed. I had to teach him basic self-defense and attack parameters step-by-step!"

Even Phantom was a little perturbed. "Did becoming an elf change Father's protections against data overwrites?"

Blues stared right back at them. "His original programming and protections are intact."

"Then how did you manage a program install?" Zero asked. "We're protected against anything external being added without permissions, and the…to have permissions for the program, wouldn't X have had to design it himself?" And X wasn't a coder, so that option…Did Blues walk him through the program construction?

Now Blues just stared at them, outright frowning as though Zero just insulted him somehow.

Ciel perked up a bit at the conversation, her voice still coming out low and a little uneven because of her nervousness. "Actually, external programs and data can be installed without issue. Low-level permissions are needed for file install of even the most basic document, as well as any and all wireless communications. Higher-level permissions for full program installs are a lot harder to manage, but not impossible, since the unit has to willingly accept the program and override the system protections that would normally hack the external program apart when an unauthorized install initiated. I ran into that problem during—" Her eyes went wide and she quickly shut right back up, ducking a bit behind Milan.

Now Blues and Rock's attention focused on Ciel. "During what?" What had she been doing that would have required overrides like that?

Milan answered that. "Ciel was hired on by the Neo Arcadian Governmental Office of Reploid Engineering four years ago for her skills with programming and construction. She was responsible for building the copy that's—"

Blues' entire demeanor changed. A flash of true anger passed over his face, unmistakable even with the sunglasses, but then he trembled as he forced more of his emotional displays offline, ignoring warning and error messages, ignoring what this was going to do to his core, to his processors. His posture became rigid and beside him, Rock's eyes widened and his lenses refocused as he shunted off Blues' empathetic resonation in his own processors, quickly damming up the flow before they looped and aggravated Blues' emotional condition. "_What do you mean, she built that facsimile in Neo Arcadia?_" Blues' voice was low and, despite him bringing many more of his emotional displays offline, the anger did not leave, his voice trembling with it.

X moved forward then, raising a hand towards Blues to try and get him to settle down. "Ciel, who contacted you about building him? I know you told me when I found this base that you had built him, but the…that governmental office _doesn't exist_." And there was no way that they'd founded it in the months after he'd lost his body.

Ciel was physically shaking as she answered, and most of the units in the room had to amplify their auditory receptors to hear her clearly. "I…I was contacted by a man from that office," though it had never been anything more than short audio communications, "who told me that my skills with Reploid engineering would be necessary because something terrible had happened to you and required a new body be built. He never gave me a name, but he provided copies of portions of your programming code, physical specs, and a few other details. I…" She shook as the memory played in her mind, the memory of a Reploid unit sneaking up on her in her room before she was going to bed, covering her nose and mouth with something she couldn't identify. When she finally recovered, finally woke up, it had been nearly a day later, and her lab was completely trashed, the copy's body missing, and a venom-filled audio recording from someone saying that if she knew what was good for her and the rest of the humans in the building she lived in, she'd keep her mouth shut about the entire incident. "I…I was sworn to secrecy because he told me…he told me that the city couldn't know. I…" She actually started crying. "I never…never finished…never intended for him to…" and she collapsed into full-blown tears, dropping to her knees as she crumbled into Milan's arms.

Blues raised a nearly-trembling hand to his forehead, closing his eyes as he tried to deal with the error messages, the indignation that yet another copy was built, yet another faulty facsimile, and it, too, was using its broken logic chains to make decisions. As a newbuilt, as a _newbuilt_, it was taken, not even completed yet, and, "…When they shunted it up to the throne, it was still a newbuilt, wasn't it?" Such a horribly planned coup, and it succeeded? How? His voice was strained, as though holding back from screaming himself. And this Reploid, now twisted beyond recovery, and for what? How did no one notice that it was a newbuilt? It should have been immediately evident.

And this was reminding both Robot Masters of another copy, of how it, too, was released as a newbuilt with faulty logic chains. How that one had to die as well, its life wasted because of someone else's carelessness. The makers have a responsibility. _A responsibility_. And instead, they set the little ones up to self-destruct?

There was nothing he could have done. Allowing that one to live would have _killed them all_.

"X…X wasn't…" Ciel stammered.

"I never really took direct part in a lot of the daily operations of the city. I was there, and I offered what time I wanted, but most people…" He frowned. "Most people said it was beneath me to come mingle with the common folk, that it wasn't necessary for me to take part in such menial tasks as the operations of my city. Sure, I handled a lot of the performance reviews and evaluations, but…" He shook his head. "The likely reason no one noticed he was a newbuilt is because, by the end, I'd not left the tower for years. No one wanted me down from the tower, content to imagine me sitting upon a throne and issuing commands to the city without ever actually raising a hand to help. My children and the Judges were my company. My people, my _city_, only cared that I remain in power. I was the one that led them to Elysium, to the paradise in the wastelands, so what was I supposed to care for those that wanted only to grovel in the dirt at my feet?" His own rage was building, aimed at no one in particular and aimed at himself for letting the situation become what it had.

"How did you not finish him?" Zero asked. "How is he _operating_ when he's incomplete?"

"My…my lab was attacked, raided, about a month before I was able to finish him. I'd been…working on getting his logic systems and judgment core built when they took him. They…whoever it was, they took that data, but I have no idea if they were able to install it. From the way the city is now, though…" and she held tightly to Milan, trying to get herself to settle down. It wasn't right for her to be this broken, not when the Resistance needed her as much as they needed X.

And X had been having his own emotional upsets as it was.

Rock was looking up at Blues worriedly now, wanting to reassure him about Copy Rock, but what could be said? They all regretted it, they all felt like they'd failed that one, somehow, even if they didn't even encounter him until after it was far too late.

And…oh, this was just _wonderful_. Blues had been running scans on the programming data he'd received from Phantom and …this wasn't their original coding at all. What the _hell_.

"If the individual you describe has enough pull in the city to deceive you, cover his tracks, and then place that newbuilt in X's niche, the it is reasonable to assume that they have been working in other corners. It will be safe to also assume that that facsimile is working under that person, possibly even taking orders from them. Someone finished its logic and judgment, sloppily done as it was. _Someone_ was also into the coding for the Pantheons, Golems, and the Emergency Response Protocols. There are large portions of added or altered coding that weren't even written to try to fit in with the rest." They may as well have highlighted and underlined the coding, it was so obvious. Blues tilted his head, opting to focus on this as a way to allow the immense anger he was feeling toward Ciel dissipate. "There are programmed 'patches' jury-rigged in here that would have resulted in the massive malfunctions in Neo Arcadia."

"Is there any way you could set up overwrites for the Pantheons and Golems that would actually stick, or are we going to have to find a way to take them temporarily offline when we take the city?" X asked. If someone was affecting the coding of these units… "Phantom, do you have copies of the coding from the power plant as well?"

"Nothing too current, no," Phantom replied. "The last time I was asked to look at the coding there was nearly three years ago, back when the output started really going haywire."

"Blues, would you mind?" X asked, turning to his brother. "I know I'm asking a lot, and I'm sorry."

"If Phantom is fine with linking again," Blues sort of shrugged though his systems were still in a high state of alarm and, honestly, he looked like he was torn between either leaving this entire situation or issuing some serious smackdown. Rock reached up to Blues with both arms, hugging him around the shoulders on tiptoe, and Blues let a slight smirk through for Rock's benefit and put a hand on the child's back. "As for the Pantheons, no, I cannot do a forceful overwrite on them; they are not mechaniloids. They would need to be offlined forcibly and requested to accept the patch after the coup."

X nodded in understanding.

Phantom reached out, silently requesting Blues' cord. Though he was okay with reconnecting with the Robot Master, his firewalls and defensive protocols were going active, shield upon shield thrown up as he selected the singular file he was going to transfer to Blues. Verifying it was being copied and transferred, he isolated it as safe to bypass his defenses while ensuring that Blues couldn't use the isolated track to delve into his systems.

He wasn't going to disappoint his uncle a second time.

Blues pulled the cord from his pocket and plugged it into his own port before moving to plug the other end into Phantom's neck. He'd have offered it to the Guardian to do it for himself, but with his hands bound, Phantom really couldn't do much of anything for himself.

Once again, Blues requested the link from Phantom, letting the Reploid set the pace. He made his 'location' more apparent this time around, too, and smiled over the link when he got a look at Phantom. '_This is much better._' It made Blues feel better, too, and it was strange to think that he was actually becoming _worried_ about this one's welfare.

Phantom verified the link before sending the file over to Blues. There was a flicker of pride at Blues' comment that echoed in his systems.

There was a feeling of approbation coming from Blues as he accepted the file, scanned it, and put it into the same subfolder as the other files from Phantom. "I'll take a look at it once I finish analyzing the coding for the others," he told X as he disengaged his link with Phantom and reached up to remove the plug once again.

"I have a question," Zero said. "The program that X uses, the defense system…is that something that can be given to other Reploids?"

"It could be applied to other Reploids, but his version won't work on anyone without his coding. I understand that Reploids are based off of X's coding, but a version specifically for those units would need to be generated. The same would apply to any units using…a different coding set." And at that, Blues actually looked up from Rock and made eye contact with Zero.

"So you'd need copies of our individual programming codes?" Zero asked. "Would you want a copy of mine?" And that was a lot to ask of Blues, coming from Zero; there was something about him that the Robot Master just _didn't_ agree with. For a moment, Zero wondered if that, too, was locked away somewhere in his damaged memories.

Blues was quiet for a long time, his expression unreadable. Internally, he was very, very quickly going over the pros and cons of this suggestion. There were no two ways about it that actually linking to Zero for anything was dangerous to the point that it was life-threatening. Blues did not think he was remotely paranoid for thinking that way, and by the worry reverberating from Rock's side of his link with the child, Rock didn't think Blues was being paranoid, either. Actually linking to him and providing a program would…

Suicidal. That's what it was. _Absolutely suicidal_. And Zero, X, all of them had no idea.

But. Getting a chance to actually look at Zero's coding? An outright link, by wire or wireless, was completely out of the question. Blues would not consider it. However, if he just bounced it to Blues over the network?

Finally, the eldest Robot Master spoke. "I'll make a mock Reploid account on the comm network. You can send a full copy there."

Zero nodded, ensured that he was online and broadcasting along the public channel, and he gave Blues his signal ID code.

Blues didn't actually need the ID code to be able to message Zero, but he accepted it anyway and, after a moment, Zero received a transfer request from a Reploid that he'd never felt on the network, from an account that didn't appear to even be online, save for the fact that it was contacting him right now, in real time.

"Is there anything you need aside from my programming?" Zero asked as he selected the coding for transfer.

"Do you have full copies of your maintenance logs?" Blues sounded a bit distracted, as though he just compiled a large reading list and was prioritizing which should go first.

Zero nodded. "Yeah, I have those. Maintenance logs are stored in a completely different section of my processor, so those won't be damaged. Why are you asking, though?"

"It could help expedite your memory recovery."

"Ah, okay," Zero said, selecting the last few day's worth of logs and sending those over to Blues as well.

Blues was quiet for several long moments, then said, "I need _full_ copies."

"Wha…?" Zero blinked, looking at Blues. "Wait, the _full _database? Blues, that's got three hundred years' worth of maintenance file logs!" Did Blues have any idea how _enormous_ that section of his processor actually was or how long that would take to transfer?

"Yes, _all_ of them," Blues said flatly, tilting his head as Rock smiled.

With a shrug, Zero selected the whole bank of files and initiated the transfer. "We're going to be here for a _minute_," he said.

"I understand that," Blues shrugged. "It can't be helped, it _is_ a large volume of data." Though breaking the upload into four parts and charging each processor with a quarter of the work did significantly cut down the wait time.

Zero groaned, dropping back down onto the examination table. "Well, does anyone else have something for me to do to pass the next seventy-six…wait…the next forty-two minutes?" Zero tilted his head up, looking at Blues. "How did you just kill almost half of the load time?"

"I delegated a portion of the upload to each processor," Blues said offhandedly.

Rock piped up with, "Why don't you break through the encryption you put on Phantom's handcuffs while the file transfers?"

"The encryption on…" Phantom looked down, hacking into the controls on his cuffs. "_Zero!_"

"What?" Zero fired back. "It's one thing for Hirondelle to trust you won't randomly take them off. It's a different matter if anyone in that room bragged about that across the comm net!"

"That's really mean, Zero, when _you_ can't even hack through it to get him out," Rock pouted, leaning into Blues slightly when Zero and Phantom began exclaiming to one another.

"Hold on!" Zero turned to Rock, actually sitting up. "I can hack through it, it just takes a minute! I've been asleep for a _century_! I'm a little rusty at this!"

"We've been asleep for two and we're older, but you've been working on the same layer for the last five minutes!"

"Do you realize how hard it is to crack a code when you've got to devote all your processor power to it?" Zero said, his voice edging toward whining at the younger Robot Master.

"It's not hard at all," Phantom said. "Just cracked the top encryption and I'm working on the next one now."

"What do you…_How_?" Zero said. "I've run the code through every translation I can think of and it still doesn't make sense!"

"Did you bother reading each of the bits backwards?" Phantom shot back. "Each bit of data is coded backwards in hexavigesimal," he stated, as if the coding had been obvious.

Zero could only stare blankly ahead as he brought down the encryption wall.

Rock opened his mouth to retort to Zero, but Blues covered his mouth with one hand, pulling the child's head back slightly so Rock was leaning against him fully and looking up at him. Blues' slight frown was enough to convince Rock to drop it.

"Cerveau," Milan piped up, "shouldn't the programmers be ending their charge cycles right about now?"

"Ah—you're right," Cerveau said once he double-checked the time. He moved to the chargers and input the sequence to end their charge cycles—normally, it was on a timer on its own, but given that they were in the med lab and were in critical condition, everything had to be cleared by a medical officer first.

"Do you need a hand?" Phantom asked.

Ciel perked up a little at this, casting a look over to Cerveau, though she remained snuggled into Milan.

"Mmm, Lady Ciel, do you want to give me a hand?" Cerveau didn't miss how uncomfortable Ciel was around the progenitor units, even though both barely glanced at her, but given their reaction to the question she asked—which was an answer he was admittedly interested in as well—he could understand why she was skittish.

Milan helped Ciel to her feet before they both moved for the back end of the room, each of them grabbing a few armloads of green cloth and setting out the uniforms on a nearby worktable.

Phantom knelt down by Rock. "Do you think you could undo the encryptions and reset the lock to its previous program for me? I'd like to help."

Rock's eyes brightened and he nodded emphatically. Before Blues could even give input, Rock pounced on the program, quickly undoing the encryption—the rest of the layers took Rock under a second to undo and toss aside—and reinstating the old, boring lock program. "I'd ask if you wanted to play with it, except handcuffs are kind of a bad place for it."

"We can play again later," Phantom said with a devious smirk. "We can put a harder version on the cuffs and make Zero undo them. The old man could use the practice, it seems."

Rock smiled wider. "That sounds fun." Almost as much fun as sledding with Phantom.

Zero was staring at the both of them. "You're both so mean," he said, dropping back against the table and staring at the progress bar and trying to glare it into going faster.

Phantom tossed the cuffs over to Zero, who deftly caught the items and set them down on the table next to him. Moving over to the last of the pods, he offered his hand to the programmer. "Come with me," he said, leading the programmer to one of the examination tables. "How are you feeling?"

"Still a little groggy," the Reploid answered. "Other than that, though, I feel better than I have in a while." He moved onto the table with Phantom's help. "Guardian Phantom…we all made it here?"

Phantom nodded, smiling. "All nine of you did, yes. Now, lay back and relax, PC-59. Cerveau's the medical officer here; he'll check on you in a minute, make sure you're out of any immediate danger from the low-power state you ended up in." Phantom looked down a little, having regretted not taking any of his crystal supplies before leaving. "If you're okay for now, I'm going to help with the others."

"Cerveau?" the programmer asked, looking to the medical officer.

"Yes," Ciel said, moving over to him with a pile of clothes. "Given time, I'll be providing all nine of you with names. Your identification codes are something of Neo Arcadia I don't intend to allow you to carry around here." She smiled softly, resting a hand against the Reploid's shoulder. "Welcome to the Resistance."

"Welcome indeed," X said, stepping forward. "I'm glad to see my son was able to bring you to safety and that you're all doing well."

"Master X?" at least six of them blurted out, looking at the Cyber Elf.

"What?" PC-59 said, looking over at X. "If you're here, then…?"

"I'll get everyone up to speed as soon as Cerveau releases you all from the med wing. Milan, get onto the comm net and tell Dande we need nine new room assignments. And tell Faucon or Autruche to get down to Loceida's," he said, looking at the piles of clothes that were being sorted out. "We're short a belt," he said.

"On it," Milan said, bouncing the messages to their intended recipients.

Cerveau came to PC-59 first, given that he was the most critical of the nine, and began his examination. "I've given you and the others two nanite injections and four months' worth of mineral supplements to get your systems back up to speed. Aside from feeling groggy, how are you? Are your systems acclimating well?"

"They're operating as well as can be expected, sir," and they were doing well. "My auto-repair's still having a few issues adjusting to the higher-than-normal supply and nanite level, but it should be able to adjust within the next couple of hours. Main systems are just a little laggy, which is why I'm groggy at the moment."

"Anything booting improperly or showing yellow or red?" Phantom asked, looking up to Cerveau. "I hope I'm not being in the way."

"Not at all," and Cerveau honestly didn't mind. "If your systems are this unfamiliar with ideal levels of resources…they'll acclimate in a few hours' time, as you projected. Just stay here and don't push yourself until your processor clears." And with that, Cerveau moved to the next unit: he wanted to get them all checked over and dressed soon so they could actually get comfortable.

"So," Ciel said, returning to the unit Phantom was attending to, "you had a pretty rough time on the way in. I'm…" She looked at him for a moment before smiling. "Reset your personal identification tag, Saule," she said.

"So soon?" X asked. "I've never seen you name a unit that quickly."

"He survived a great deal," she said. "To bend without breaking, to whether the storm that's been raging in Neo Arcadia…like a willow tree. So, Saule." Ciel looked to the unit. "Does that meet with your approval?" Her smile widened when he nodded.

Cerveau smiled as well, checking the other units over, making sure that nothing was booting up flagged, that nothing was hurting. They all seemed a bit overwhelmed, which was honestly expected, but they all seemed relieved to have made it, too.

It'd be a relief to anyone, particularly considering that each had an Order of Retirement issued against them.

"Milan, did Dande shoot back any room assignments?" X asked.

"They're all going to be stationed on Level Five," Milan answered. "Rooms Twenty-Two through Thirty, unless any of them are bunking together." He wasn't sure if they would be. Most Neo Arcadian Reploids had subdued their emotional drives to keep their lives, so for any of them to have been developing attachments was next to unheard of.

"We had nine rooms available in a row?" X asked, then floated back a step when the realization had hit him about _why_. "We've…did anyone move their things?"

Milan nodded solemnly. "They've been boxed and marked."

Phantom and Zero both looked, Phantom to his father and Zero at Milan.

"What are you talking about?" Zero finally asked.

"The…units we lose on the raids, like the ones we lost when we went after you," Ciel answered, "aren't forgotten. Their belongings are kept safe, and we intend to build memorials for them once the city is ours again, even if it's not done in a public area." To honor their sacrifice for the Resistance and the true head of the city. "Neige and her group keep us updated on the ones we can't save in the city."

Most of the senior Resistance members fell silent for a moment.

That list was already over six thousand names long.

Rock's brow furrowed, and he opened his mouth as to ask a question aloud, but thought better of it and instead queried Blues. Rock's eyes widened when the elder unit informed him what they were talking about.

Casualties. Why…Rock's brow furrowed…why did it seem odd that they were giving Reploids memorials? Rock knew that they should get them, that it was right that they get them, but for some reason, Rock thought that a lot of people would oppose that and it'd be prevented from happening. But he couldn't remember _why_ he thought that way. And all Blues would tell him was that they needed to be happy that this much progress had been made.

Milan helped one of the programmers out of her pod, handing her the pile of clothes and directing her towards a blocked-off section in the back of the lab so that she could change. She stumbled a bit as she moved, and Ciel looked towards her, watching her gait.

"Milan," she called, "when she's done changing, I need you to help her over to one of the exam tables." From the way the unit was limping, Ciel wondered if she'd offlined her sensory receptors to ignore something wrong with the limb. "Phantom, that unit there…"

"PC-71," he supplied. "What of her?"

"Was she injured at all on the way here? She's got a bad limp."

Phantom shook his head. "She was limping when I found her in Neo Arcadia. She didn't tell me if anything was wrong, but all things considered, I was there in an…_official _capacity, so she wasn't really much for talking about anything."

Ciel looked at the unit. "Cerveau, can I get the pod's maintenance logs for her?"

"Of course," Cerveau answered, moving over to PC-71's pod and transferring the maintenance logs to his pad for Ciel to look over. He handed her the pad before returning to his examination of the last of the programmers.

Ciel's eyes scanned the data, quickly narrowing her search down to the nanite's repair logs. "Cerveau, I think we're going to have to actually open 71's leg up. The nanites logged a repair attempt, but there's something they're having issues with." Something compromised in her systems?

Cerveau grabbed the rolling cart he kept his tools on and brought it over to where Ciel was standing, placing it beside the examination table. "How bad is the limp?" If they were going to open her up, he'd need some synthetic skin to close the incision back up at the very least, and possibly some parts. They wouldn't know what until they had a look, of course.

"It's nothing too pronounced that she can't walk on it at all," and she wasn't reflexively curling the leg up or trying to carry her weight more on the good leg. "I'm thinking the majority of the limp is coming from a lack of sensory reception. Here," she said, passing the data pad back to Cerveau. "Look at the logs here. She's got months-old red flags showing up. Even the new nanites are having issues addressing it. Maybe because of the sensory offline?" Current-gen Reploids did tend to be wired in ways where the systems occasionally crisscrossed if they were poorly maintained.

"If the injury has been causing problems for that long, we may very well have to replace some of her parts," Cerveau hummed thoughtfully. "The sensory offline may have sent false error messages to her auto-repair system and misdiagnosed the issue with the nanites."

"I was thinking the same thing."

Milan approached with PC-71, helping her onto the table.

"Hello," Ciel said, greeting the unit. "I don't mean to pry, but we noticed that you've got a pretty bad limp with your right leg and that the nanites weren't able to direct any actual repairs during your recharge cycle." Ciel took the Reploid's hand in hers. "We'll do what we can to help, but we need to know what's wrong."

"I was in an accident with an industrial unit about half a year ago, ma'am. I had been on my way home and had been…the unit dropped a steel beam on my leg," she said. "Auto-repairs were able to take care of most of it, ma'am, and my mechanic was able to rebuild what needed it, but…the sensory network's been misfiring since. I've kept it offline to keep from getting a retirement order because of the effect the pain would have had on me otherwise."

"We can replace the parts manually if it's something your nanites can't correct on their own, but as Lady Ciel said, we'll have to open you up." Cerveau helped her to straighten her leg once she laid back on the table, trying to be as gentle as he could. "I think it'd be best for you to bring your whole leg's sensory network offline for this."

The unit nodded, quickly offlining the whole leg. "Done, sir," she said.

Cerveau stepped forward then, pulling the cart closer to himself and Ciel both. He had to cut open the synthetic skin to even see what was going on inside, and once her leg was opened up, Cerveau paused, his frown deepening. It'd been a long, long time since he saw so many parts that need to be outright replaced in one location.

Ciel leaned over, grabbing a mask and drawing it over her mouth, before turning her attention to the Reploid's leg. She looked over the parts, her frown matching Cerveau's. "We're going to need to send someone down for parts," she said, her voice slightly muffled by the mask, "and hope that we've got everything we need. Cerveau, could you please hand me a pair of gloves?" While Reploids generally could work on each other regardless of the conditions (though sanitary and sterile conditions were preferred), humans that worked on the units had to take much of the same precautions that they did when operating on other humans. "When you said your…mechanic," and her voice didn't hide her discomfort with using the term, "rebuilt you, did they just repair your parts and reinstall them?"

"Yes, ma'am," PC-71 answered. "It's best to not strain the city's resources if you want to keep living."

Ciel shook her head and looked to Cerveau, taking the offered gloves and putting them on. "Unless you want to send Milan down, could you message someone to get the parts we need? From what I can see, we need all four motor servos and a batch of sensory wiring." She leaned closer, moving some of the unit's parts aside. "At least her skeleton survived the impact. We won't have to rebuild the lower leg from scratch." She frowned again. "And we're going to need a lot of new tubing." Whole sections of the robot's coolant and lubricant lines were completely missing, tied off to keep the fluids from draining into the limb.

Cerveau took a few moments to do an in-depth scan, measuring the leg and the parts, quickly making a list of the parts they'd need and sending the request out, flagged as urgent, to Rocinolle. It specified what Cerveau needed and how much of it, and requested that she bring it up immediately: that would be most appreciated. "Rocinolle is bringing the parts up now," since no one ever dallied if it was an urgent request from the lead medical officer. "It'll take some time, but we should be able to do a full repair in here."

Ciel grabbed a few tools off of the nearby cart, setting the wire cutters down as she started working the cover panels off of the Reploid's motor servos. "Cerveau, I think we're going to rewire the entire system. Look," she said, pointing to the damaged and frayed wire inside the first servo. "This…" she sighed, resisted the urge to slam her head into the table, and started following the wires to the data terminals where they were attached. "I'm almost scared to see what the civilian units in the city look like right now if this is considered an effective means of rehabilitating a unit after an injury." She looked at 71, smiling a bit. "We'll have you back up to spec in no time."

This was, after all, what Ciel was best at.


	22. The Omega Protocol

_So there's a running theme with our brainstorming sessions for this story and others. We sit down and talk about possible directions it could take (sometimes with a large bottle of alcohol, which, surprisingly, doesn't muddy much up). Once we've determined where we want to go with this particular plot point or subplot, I always pose a question to Midnyght. I always ask, 'Okay, this is good, but how can we make it **worse**?' _

_That is my anthem and from it, we've distilled a brewery's worth of unmitigated, unfiltered nightmare fuel._

_So please, sit down, relax, and enjoy. We're getting to the fun part. _

_I'm so, so sorry, Blues._

_**Disclaimer:**__ Mega Man and all related characters and information are the property of Capcom Co., Ltd., Akira Kitamura and Keiji Inafune._

* * *

><p>It had taken Ciel and Cerveau near on three hours to get PC-71 back up to spec, but when she finally moved from the table, testing out her new servos, she was able to move without a limp.<p>

Ciel sighed, removing her mask and gloves and tossing them to the tabletop as she leaned over. "Cerveau, let someone from storage know we've got parts to recycle." Moving to a nearby chair, she dropped into it, although her body language did shift a bit when she realized that Blues and Rock were still hovering at the door.

Since Blues shushed him, Rock contented himself with snuggling into the older unit's side, his arms around Blues' middle, his gaze looking a little sleepy as it flitted between everyone in the room, focusing on whomever was speaking. Blues was listening intently, but otherwise was just waiting, standing almost completely still.

X looked to each of the units in turn, motioning for them to sit down. "I know that what you have been through has been sudden and likely traumatic," he began, "but I want to welcome you again and let you know that here, in this base, you're safe from what Neo Arcadia would wish to do with you. I would think all nine of you are old enough to remember the capture of Dark Elf four years ago and my…extended departure for systems recovery and maintenance."

PC-19 spoke up then. "You were down for the better part of a year, and when you finally stepped back into the public eye…"

X nodded. "Copy X was put in a position of leadership where I could no longer. Extenuating circumstances actually fractured my physical and data selves, so while my body remains at Sanctum Yggdrasil as the seal on Dark Elf's prison, we're trying to help as many of the citizens as we can while Commander Ciel and I try to figure out how to correct the issues with the power station. This, as you can imagine, cannot be done in the city proper, which is why we're stationed as far out as we are." That they'd _walked_ all the way from Neo Arcadia still left X surprised.

PC-28 looked to X. "If you're heading the Resistance, then you must know that the raids are not doing anything positive for the city, especially when you steal parts."

"While that may carry a grain of truth, the raids that we do perform are more often to recover units who, like yourselves, have been marked as Maverick and slated for retirement. That we help ourselves to the storehouses every now and again simply ensures that we can take care of our own." X smiled at PC-71, "Much like you have experienced with the medical care here."

The programmer nodded. "And I'm thankful that your mechanics were willing to—"

"Medic," Cerveau corrected, not sounding overly offended. He was used to Neo Arcadians making that mistake, but his skills far exceeded what any mere mechanic could do.

"I'm…I'm thankful your medics were willing to do so much."

Another nod. "That being said, I heard that when we hit the city a little over a week ago, there was an incident topside. Have any of you had a chance to look over the problem coding since then?"

"Not really," PC-19 answered. "Guardian Phantom came for us not long after we'd been informed that our units were the ones that had…done that."

The programmers all fell silent at the memory.

Blues stepped forward then, into the lab, Rock refusing to relinquish his grip around Blues' middle. The older unit didn't seem to mind it, though. "I've examined the coding," he said, looking to the programmers, then to X. "There are several…points that are concerning."

Saule looked to the unit that had been by the door the entire time. "Concerning how?" he asked.

"Do you mind if I use one of the monitors?" Blues asked Cerveau, his gaze turning to bore into the medic.

"No, go ahead," Cerveau replied, shaking his head: they were done with them.

After a moment, coding flickered onto the main monitor in the lab, the one used to display data to more than one or two units. "As I was examining the coding, I noticed passages that are very blatant…overwrites of the original coding," and several lines of code were highlighted to illustrate Blues' point. "Here and here are adjustments to their emergency response protocols, and this…" and a new set of code was highlighted, "_this_ is an addendum in friend/foe recognition. What I do not know is who wrote this." And with those words, Blues' gaze shifted back to the programmers.

Four of the units were on their feet immediately, the rest staring at the coding as if astounded by it.

"That's…" PC-44 covered her mouth. "Who the _hell_ added that? It's not even encoded in the same manner. The units should have been malfunctioning, not even able to move!" She looked to Blues. "The conflicts alone should have offlined them until maintenance could be run."

Saule looked at the coding for a moment. "Is there an override patch somewhere? Active Pantheon units aren't supposed to be programmable like this, not without…it would have taken us authorizing this for it to go through." He shook his head. "Someone forced the program protection overrides."

"The coding is crawling in patches," Blues said simply, looking to the screen again as one of the patches came up, the cracked override, the new files. "Who, aside from you, would have access to this?" Rock was staring intently at the coding, eyes round, his instincts making him want to go into the coding, to delve in and _fix it_. Even though the Pantheon units couldn't be fixed that way. Blues ran his hand along the child's back reassuringly: it was good to want to fix things, good to want to help, but this time, they couldn't help that way.

PC-19 shook his head. "No one has that authority. That aside, there's reprogramming protections, overwrite security, that shouldn't be able to be bypassed." The coders all looked over the patches, shaking their heads. "This wasn't any of us, and it doesn't look like the coding style that's standard for the city. Maybe older, maybe someone before our lines?" Even though the older a Reploid got, the higher their chances were that the city would find a reason to retire them.

Blues pondered the coding for several moments; it seemed that if he wanted to know, he'd have to go back to Neo Arcadia for some digging around of his own. Perhaps after things were more secure, after Rock was more independent. He glanced to X, but the Cyber Elf seemed to be at a loss as well. "I cannot say who it could have been," he really didn't have enough data to even begin to guess names. Or serial numbers, as it were. One thing was certain, though: these changes were hidden and Blues hadn't looked at their coding, only ordered them away from key points in the city. The First Law relinquished its chokehold on Blues' systems.

* * *

><p>Hirondelle woke slowly from hibernation, pushing himself from his pod and immediately connecting with the communications and security networks. Having been up far past his normally scheduled recharge time looking over the maps that Phantom had provided, he'd woken up late. A peripheral blinked as soon as he verified the connection, a priority alert message from Aigle. Selecting it, he frowned at the message, immediately establishing a private line with the officer.<p>

'_What do you mean Pelerin blabbed over the public line about Guardian Phantom?_'

'_Exactly what it sounded like. I think he was under the impression that it was going to start providing the Guardian the trust necessary to have him allowed around the base without the cuffs, but a few of the others are already concerned that we need to modify the locking system._'

Hirondelle frowned, sending a connection request to Pelerin, his frown only deepening when the Reploid answered.

'_Yes, sir?_'

'_For an intelligence officer, you're awfully stupid sometimes. Do you have any idea how much damage letting that out into public forum could have caused? I'm honestly surprised no one's tried to attack Guardian Phantom because of this!_'

'_Sir, with all due respect, I thought it would have been a good idea to establish that we can trust him._'

'_That doesn't mean that you had the authority to release that information, much less drop that on open comms!_' Hirondelle was honestly annoyed with this unit. Sighing, he turned his attention to the public channels, sending out a request for someone to find out where Master X was.

Cerveau was the one to respond. Zero was delivering the updated logs for his memory recovery efforts and, this time, X came along as well. '_Master X is currently in the med lab._'

'_I'm guessing that you might have heard Pelerin's broadcast earlier,_' and Hirondelle sighed when Cerveau confirmed that he had. '_That considered, could you please ask Masters X and Zero to get onto the network. I'd like to discuss this matter with them and see if the base is okay with having Guardian Phantom released from Master Zero's custody._'

'_That would be for the best, I think,_' Cerveau agreed, then turned to look to X. "Master X, there's been another…slip on the network and, as Master Zero can't divide his attention here, I think you may want to come online," and yell at these idiots. Again.

X rubbed at his helmet, sighed, and moved for the terminal in Cerveau's lab, uploading the network, a hint of anger in his voice when he signed on. '_Is there something wrong with your neural networks that you can't seem to keep out of the damn rumor mill long enough for us to have _one_ normal day?_' Honestly, this group was less a resistance and more a gaggle of chatterbox teenagers with each passing day. '_Okay, I can understand, at least to a point, the idea that the communications network is an informal chat area, but seriously? Are all of you this bored with your assignments, because I'm fairly certain that Ciel and I can find something for you do in the meanwhile._'

'_It's not that, Master X,_' Mouette replied. '_Despite the fact that Hirondelle believes Phantom to be less of a risk, the fact that he's able to remove his handcuffs at will is worrisome, if not more._'

'_And has anyone taken into consideration what it means that he _hasn't_?_' Hirondelle asked. '_Had Pelerin the foresight to think how to phrase his original message to everyone, I'm fairly certain he would have thought to mention that I emphasized the point that Phantom is allowing himself to remain bound spoke volumes, but seeing the chatter bouncing around right now, I doubt he mentioned any of what I said on the matter._'

'_For all of you to be this quick to judge scares me,_' X admitted. '_I can understand that, yes, my son is one of the four Guardians, but we allowed each of you a chance to prove yourselves. The fact that you're denying _that_ to my son makes me really question if any of you understand the core reason we are doing what we are here, what we intend to do as a whole._'

'_That said,_' Hirondelle continued, '_I'd like to make a formal request that Guardian Phantom be allowed to move around the base without the cuffs and without Master Zero as his escort,_' seeing as, in all honesty, the Guardian had more than proven himself, '_and would like to raise this concern with the Resistance Commanders._'

X nodded. '_Milan, is Ciel awake?_' He figured she was, that she'd been awake for a few hours, but he'd rather ask than assume.

'_She is, Master X. Would you like me to provide her with a comm feed?_'

'_Please,_' X replied.

'_Is everything okay, X?_' Ciel asked a moment later.

'_Hirondelle is requesting that we allow Phantom to move freely around the base,_' X explained. '_I'm already in support of this, but we need your confirmation of the order as well._'

'_May I enquire as to the source of this request?_' she asked, hoping Hirondelle would explain _why_ he'd made the request less than a week after Phantom had arrived. There were protocols in place for the capture and containment of enemy Neo Arcadian units, after all.

'_Yesterday, when Guardian Phantom provided us with updated maps of the city, I…requested that he remove his cuffs as a demonstration of the trust I already had in him. For him to have allowed himself to remain bound as such, to remain under Master Zero's watch, stands as testament to the fact that he is here for valid reasons._'

Ciel nodded, though no one but Milan and Alouette could see the motion. '_I approve, then,_' she replied. '_X, would it be reasonable to provide him with access codes to the communications network as well? As I understand it, your brother is managing the network at present. Would he…_' and she hesitated a moment, realizing that Blues could very likely hear her. '_Do you think your brother would mind keeping an eye on Phantom's comm activity to ensure that he's not doing anything…unauthorized?_'

'_It wouldn't be a problem,_' Blues answered after a moment. He'd needed to take the time to reenter his mock Reploid account and answer that way. He honestly didn't think the Resistance as a whole was ready to feel the two Robot Masters on the network, particularly considering the rumor mills spinning. This way would feel more 'normal' to them, even if it wasn't normal to him at all.

He was in his room now, analyzing the coding sets he'd received while Rock sat on the bed, trying to overwrite his lock program on the door with one of Rock's own. '_I will monitor Phantom as well; if anything is amiss, I will revoke his access rights to the network._' That wouldn't be a problem; he was already monitoring everything on the network, so what was one more unit in the grand scheme of things? Nothing at all.

In all honesty, Rock required more of his time, attention, and concentration than the Resistance as a whole, three times over. Although, with these coding sets…

He estimated several more hours, maybe three, before he finished decrypting Zero's coding.

'_Thank you,_' Ciel said, careful to avoid using any title (or lack thereof) when addressing the Robot Master.

'_Alright,_' X said. '_Can I get someone from the security team to generate new logon access codes for Phantom?_'

Dande responded immediately. '_I can handle that, Master X. Would you like me to relay the codes to Master Zero?_'

'_That would be appreciated,_' X answered, '_though you'll have to wait for Zero to come online._'

'_Understood, Master X._'

'_So, does anyone else want to mess up my day any worse than it already had been?_' X was honestly frustrated, and every unit on the comm could hear it clearly. When silence resounded around him, X nodded, exiting the network.

"Some days," he said, looking to Cerveau, "I really wonder if the city is even bothering giving them anything in the way of core judgment and sensibility protocols."

"They're not allowed to learn and grow, not allowed to really see anything outside of what box Neo Arcadia encloses them into, so now that they're older and are more set in their ways, it's hard for them to adjust to change," Cerveau said charitably, though he did commiserate with X on his point. "They should be maintaining a more…professional outlook, though."

"Still…" X said, rubbing at his helmet again.

"So, wait, what did I miss?" Zero asked, turning away from Cerveau.

"We're going to be granting Phantom access to the communications network and allowing him to move around the base unsupervised." X smiled at his son. "Moineau will probably be here in a few minutes to take back his cuffs."

Phantom nodded mutely, still sitting on the chair he'd dropped into when he'd trailed Zero into the lab almost an hour prior.

* * *

><p>'<em>I've finished my analysis of Zero's coding and logs,<em>' Blues began, reaching out over his link with Shadow, establishing that he had the Wilybot's attention before continuing. '_There were no changes imposed on his systems. I've combed through every line of every log; nothing. He was not forcibly reprogrammed._'

'_So his personality is…_'

'_An adjustment, an overwrite that Zero imposed on himself. He rejected the base personality that Wily imposed on him and adjusted it based on his own wants and desires._'

'_That's…_'

'_He's not the first to disregard his personality programming._'

'_That's true._' Forte managed it well enough, and his programming was far more restrictive than an android's.

'_The concept behind that project was based off of the X Project, so it makes sense that he would…retain the free will to do so._'

'_I should be relieved_,' Shadow began, frowning. Honestly, it was a relief in the sense that that unit hadn't been forcibly reprogrammed the way so many of the Robot Masters had been, especially considering what Zero's base purpose was meant to be. '_But that programming is still intact._' And so long as it was, they were all in a considerable amount of danger.

Blues was silent for several moments before responding and Shadow got the feeling that he was flipping through lines of coding. '_It is still very much intact. Unlike Rock, only Zero's memory files were corrupted; his personality and learned skills seem to be mostly if not completely intact._'

'_And thus, his basic programming could still activate and become dominant over Zero's._'

'_Yes._'

'_Break Man…_' Shadow hesitated, loathe to voice what he wanted to say, loathe to issue him with the imperative.

'_I'll take care of it._'

* * *

><p>Blues reached over his link to X, fortifying it and pulling slightly to catch the android's attention. '<em>X, I need to have a word with you and Zero. In your room.<em>' Blues considered telling X in a nicer, less blunt fashion, but really, what could be said? They needed to talk, and _now_.

X froze at Blues' tone, worried about what the Robot Master wasn't saying over the link. He considered asking Blues what was wrong for a moment, but then decided against it. '_We'll be down as soon as Zero finishes providing Cerveau with his maintenance logs._'

Blues was already on his way to X's room, having left Rock in Shadow's care. The child was still trying to overwrite the locking program on the door, becoming more inventive by the minute, but thus far, Blues countered each of Rock's attempts easily. '_I'll be waiting._'

"Cerveau, how much longer is Zero going to be—"

As if on cue, the system pinged softly, indicating that the load had just completed.

Zero disconnected the cable, pushing himself from the table before turning to X. "You need me for something?"

"We need to head back downstairs," X said. "Although you might want to get back on the network to provide Phantom with his access codes. He still needs to return the cuffs to Moineau," even though the Reploid was already free of the restraints and idling about in the lab.

Zero nodded, reconnecting and getting the message immediately, passing the information along to Phantom. "Don't get yourself into too much trouble while we're gone," he called over his shoulder, heading for the door to the lab and the lift that was (hopefully) waiting for him and X.

Although, the ladder proved a very viable and fun alternative.

Zero, in the end, opted to just drop down the ladder shaft, X floating down behind him, as they moved for the room.

X was the first through, having actually gone through the door and then remembering to trigger the door to open for Zero. "Blues, what's wrong?" he asked as Zero stepped in behind him and immediately flopped into the nearby chair.

"I completed my decryption of Zero's coding and analysis of his logs," Blues said simply. The Robot Master was silent for several moments, apparently pondering X and Zero alike, as though pondering _what_ exactly to tell them. "What of the function designated as the 'Omega Protocol' do you know?"

Zero shrugged. "Like I said, it was part of what the research crews analyzed to create Mother Elf and the cure for the Maverick Virus. It was also the reason that I, along with X and Axl, were immune, though I'm certain they had different reasons for said immunity." There'd been no similar protocol found in either of their analyzed drives as far as he was aware.

X, however, remained silent for a long moment, finally turning his eyes to the floor and refusing to answer.

Blues looked to X, scrutinizing him for several moments before turning to Zero. "The Omega Protocol…is your core programming. Although, I believe that X would be more adept at explaining it than I."

"What?" Zero turned to X. "What is he talking about, X?"

X sighed heavily, dropping into a hover as he struggled to bring his eyes level with Zero. "The…the Omega…the protocol wasn't just your programming. It…it was part of a…part of other components as well, part of…" X faltered, still unable to look at Zero. "The…the…" A heavy sigh, laden with more emotions than Zero cared to analyze. "Remember that memory file you restored, the one where…where you were Maverick?"

Zero nodded, silent.

"The…the reason you had…had been…that way," X said, looking as if he were fighting tears, "is because…you're _not _immune. You're not immune from the Virus at all…because…" He buried his face in his hands. "Because you're Case Zero. You're the _original carrier_."

Zero stared blankly at X, as if he wasn't able to compute what X had just said.

"What do you mean _I wasn't immune?_" Zero finally blurted.

"You weren't immune. You were resistant to the effects of the Maverick Virus. You…it was a power source for you, not an infection. You weren't immune because it wasn't something your systems couldn't use, couldn't react to, react with. You could use the virus, control it…it was part of your original body's power system. _Everything_ about the body Omega had was hardwired to work with the virus, though…" though they'd never fully figured out _why._ "I…I didn't want you to find out like this, not without understanding more of the past, more of the memories from back then." X looked up finally, and his eyes were brimming with pain and phantom tears that would never fall.

"Your maker was…a very sick man by the time your project _began_. His coding style was convoluted and littered with excess data, littered with encryptions and false leads, dead ends. The virus wasn't the entirety of the Omega Protocol, but it was one of the major…applications that stemmed from it. The virus was a mechanism by which you were intended to exert control over other android-classification units. Those infected would have fallen under your sway had the protocol executed as it was intended to. _However_, you did not fulfill that portion of your function. Had you continued as originally programmed, you would have summarily taken all of the Reploids under your sway and exerted yourself over the human population." Blues moved to the terminal in X's room, the screen booting up even before he got there, and several lines from Zero's maintenance logs appeared on the screen. It was the decrypted version, stated plainly, and it was line after line of alterations to Zero's personality matrix.

"Look at these logs. You, Zero, overwrote your own default personality programming," Blues looked back to Zero. "You exerted dominance over the default personality. There was…an altercation, shortly after you were activated in 21XX, when the Omega Protocol was supplanted by your nascent personality. There was blunt force trauma to your processor reported in the logs, followed by a massive recovery effort by your auto-repair systems. Your fledgling personality, _you_, Zero, remained the dominant personality since."

"An…alterca—" Zero blanked out suddenly, another memory file hitting the top of his repair queue, and the blonde only remained separate from the floor because he'd sat down before the information had been dumped on him. He watched, unable to react, as he saw countless Reploids fall before him, their fluids coating his armor and the floor. He saw, like a nightmare, the form of a taller Reploid silhouetted by the sunlight spilling from the doorway leading to the lab. He watched blow after blow missing the taller unit, watched as he actually gained the upper hand…as the Reploid had lost half of one of his own arms.

Had he really done that with _his bare hands?_

He saw the unit fall against him, relived those moments…before something triggered in his systems.

"Sigma…" he whispered, hand rising to his helmet and rubbing at the crystal there. "What…"

"Commander Sigma had only managed to take you down because you'd hesitated. Somewhere in all of what happened," X said, remembering looking over the logs with Doctor Cain and Sigma when Zero had been brought back to the Hunter base, "he'd managed a lucky blow that damaged your crystal and triggered your systems offline to redirect recovery efforts." After that?

The Zero that had woken up in the lab had been radically different than the thing that Sigma had fought in the lab.

X looked to Blues now. "Maybe…is it possible that Zero completed the personality overwrite after Sigma had offlined him?"

"Yes," and the logs scrolled down some to display more lines of edits. "The full changeover completed while Zero was offline and repairing, although…" Blues frowned at this next thought, "the logs indicate that your systems stopped short of actually rewriting the Protocol, of getting rid of that personality." For the androids, rewriting the base programming was impossible; that was one thing that was restricted, unlike the Robot Masters.

Zero looked at the data, read it over a couple times, before turning to Blues. "Can you delete it?"

Blues looked…not affronted, but surprised that Zero would even consider that. "No, you're an android and that is your base programming. It cannot be outright purged from your systems. However…" Blues trailed off and frowned.

"Well…" Blues was right about that; reprogramming protections meant that base programming couldn't be changed as easily as addendum programming, but there had to be a way, had to be some chance that Blues wouldn't keep holding this unwanted past against him. "What…" and a bit of his old hacking days came back to him, "what about corrupting the data? Make it unrecoverable. Dump so much garbage data on top of the information that the systems can't repair it. I know my auto-repair doesn't work like the rest of the Reploids, but even the nanites can't repair coding. You're…you're good with coding," if all his work with Rocinolle was an inkling of indication, "so could you damage the data, the Omega Protocol, beyond recoverable status?"

X actually blanched at this and stared at Zero with wide eyes. To ask _anyone_ to corrupt _base programming_? Was Zero _insane_? "Zero…do you know what that could do to whatever of you there is aside from what Blues would affect?" Worst-case scenario would be that the Zero that woke from the procedure wouldn't be anything like the android he remembered, that he'd be a completely different unit, memories or no.

Zero nodded. "I know enough about how systems work to know the risks," he said. "I…" He looked away. "If I made the choice to be who I am, if I created who I am because I didn't want to be what the Protocol demanded of me…then I'm willing to make whatever sacrifices are necessary." And not just to have peace of mind. It'd mean so much more for the safety of every unit in the base if he could no longer be controlled by the personality that had nearly destroyed Sigma. He nodded. "If it can be done, I'm willing to undergo the procedure."

Blues was staring in X and Zero's general direction, though his gaze was focused on neither android. Internally, he was weighing the risks with the possible benefits. Blues couldn't tell X and Zero, but this was just as dangerous to him. He had Rock to consider.

At length, the eldest of the Robot Masters finally replied, "I…can theoretically corrupt the protocol and make it so that it is completely irretrievable. However, to do that, we'd have to link directly and you'd have to lower _all _of your firewalls and grant me the highest level of access such a connection allows." And even then…

"If it means that I'm…if it means that I'm _Zero_, that I'm who I _want_ to be, then I'll do whatever is necessary. All my firewalls down, all my defenses deactivated. I…" he stopped, sighed heavily, and then looked to Blues, looking the Robot Master in the eye, sunglasses or no, and said, "I just want to be who this Resistance needs me to be, who _X_ needs me to be." Even if he couldn't understand _why_ he knew X in particular needed that reassurance.

"Zero…"

"No, X. This…this has to be done. I want to be me, be whom I made of myself. I can't remember who I was, not all of it. I can barely remember who Axl was, though I know I knew him. I remember names, faces, things I can't fully identify from my past, but…" He blinked, looking up to X before repeating words he'd said a century ago. "My power is not meant for destruction. My power is for protecting the things my friends and I believe in. You told your children that, told them what I said in that fight. I meant it. I _meant_ it, X. What that thing was, what Omega was made into, was what I was meant to be. That…that's not me anymore." Zero nodded. "And it never will be."

"If you mean what you say, then we can go ahead and begin with it upstairs, in the med lab." Blues was straight to business, more wanting to get it over with than any real eagerness to get into Zero's systems. He knew, in the back of his mind, that even if Zero lowered all of his firewalls, lowered all of his _conscious_ defenses, that Blues would still be in an incredible amount of danger.

If everything went well, X and Zero would never know that portion of it.

Zero looked to X with a smirk. "Maybe it's a good thing I never restored the memory file that had to do with my aversion towards the medical wing." Turning, he headed for the door. "I'll see you upstairs. I'm going to help Cerveau prep the lab." And with that, he stepped out of the room.

"You're _nuts_," X said, turning to Blues, "and not just for whatever you're going to attempt. You're not telling me something, not telling _Zero_ something, and I know it." He'd heard the way that Blues had been avoiding topics for the past week or so; he'd been able to read his brother a bit better as time went on. "What aren't you letting us in on?"

Blues headed toward the door and spared a moment to glance back to X. "It's not something that concerns you." With that, he slipped out of the room.

X groaned, shook his head, and walked out behind Blues.

When he finally got his body back, he was going to shake some sense into his older brother.

Yelling at him had already proven horribly ineffective.

In the hall, they passed Phantom. Blues tilted his head as Rock's aura suddenly shifted gears, radiating exuberance and glee: Phantom was coming to play with him! Blues had to smirk slightly at that, even as he boarded the lift.

"Cerveau," Zero called as he walked into the lab, "we need an exam table. You got a minute to help set up, maybe help Blues when he gets here?"

Cerveau came out from one of the back rooms, looking more than slightly confused. "What happened?" Set up an exam table? What?

"Nothing happened…well, nothing serious, anyway. I just need to have things set up before Blues gets up here." Zero noticed the look of confusion on Cerveau's face. "Blues is going to help me with a bit of my programming, straighten out a few things in some of the coding. He wanted to do this in the med lab, though, so I figure the sooner I get things set up for him, the better." The Robot Master was not one to idle about.

X trailed behind Blues as the elder waited for the lift to ascend. "Blues, wait. If this was just a matter of a direct link, wouldn't the cable be enough?" He'd linked with Phantom, hadn't he? "Why are you going to the lab?" And willingly, when X hadn't been able to get him to go there without Rock goading him along?

"The lab is better," Blues shrugged. "Zero may not have the port type to link with me," since Zero was a Wilybot, "so if we need to rig anything up, the med lab is fully supplied."

X nodded, though there was still that lilt to Blues' voice that X was starting to think was his 'tell' when he wasn't supplying the full story. He shrugged, heading up the lift shaft as the platform continued to climb upwards. He moved for the lab, surprised to see Zero already sorting through a drawer of connector cables. "What are you doing?"

"Finding an older cable," Zero said. "I'm not based off of your designs like Phantom is. I don't…" He pointed to the back of his neck, opening the data port. "This, as far as I'm aware, isn't something Blues has the ability to link into. He's built differently, and there's the consideration that this is my second body." Zero finally found a slightly worn cable, and he pulled it out to examine it. "Well, at least this one's just got a problem with the insulation, but the wires look fine." Zero frowned, looking over his shoulder. "X, where's your brother?"

Blues walked in then, looking not quite agitated, but off, somehow. "I'm here. Did you find a cable?" Blues had more than one port type, probably more than the Reploids anticipated, but with centuries between when the ports were installed and now…they may have to splice Blues' cable to one with a port that was functional with Zero's.

Zero tossed the cable to Blues as he vaulted onto the exam table, sitting up until Blues had a chance to assemble the cable and plug in. "Need a hand with anything?" he asked.

"I'm fine," Blues replied shortly, though his voice wasn't cutting or disapproving the way it was when he was displeased or disappointed in someone. Blues double-checked the cable carefully and sent a private message to Shadow. He detailed a new set of orders for the Robot Master, including new circumstantial orders pertaining to Rock.

Blues didn't physically hesitate, though he was internally loathe to do this, loathe to risk this. And the cables needed to be wired together. Blues rolled up his sleeve, allowed his arm to shift into his variable system, quickly snipping both cables and splicing them together with practiced ease, as though this was something he did multiple times every day. He double-checked his work, made sure it was wired properly, before moving over to Zero and sliding the plug into his port. Forcing himself not to balk, not to falter, Blues slid the plug into his own port, then queried Zero for access.

Zero granted the access readily, disengaged every firewall and defense system, lowering all his protections and allowing the Robot Master the unimpeded access he required. He fired back with a link verification, but beyond that, his systems were quiet. "Probably better for me to stay out of hibernation for this?" To ensure nothing went too horribly wrong.

"No, it's best that you stay awake and let me know if anything…critical occurs," Like if the corruption began to affect Zero's _other_ base programming, the portions that they actually wanted to keep. And with that, Blues pushed forward into Zero's systems, into his mind, and quickly found the protocol. Blues carefully isolated it, carefully set it aside to try to prevent it from causing any alarm in Zero's systems, then began the work. He could corrupt the files without much of a problem, android or no, though he did need to be careful not to destroy Zero himself: Wilybot or not, that would be terrible.

Zero relaxed, rested against the exam table, and let Blues work. Though he was interested in what Blues was doing, interested in learning the aspects of his coding, he was sure that he'd be able to ask the Robot Master for the log files after the procedure had been completed.

X hovered by the door, watching his brother work. A sick, cold feeling wormed its way into his stomach, but he ignored it. It was, after all, _Zero_ that was being worked on, that was having his base programming, the core part of his systems, tampered with, changed, corrupted.

He closed his eyes for a moment, hoping that however this all played out, Zero would walk away from it in one piece.

Zero, too, let his eyes drift closed, feeling the odd probing sensation firing through his processor, and he forcibly offlined all of his anti-hack measures when that program starting to wake…

Systems recognized the feel of the Robot Master, recognized exactly what it was, and they silently activated, stealthily waking after a centuries-long sleep. Systems and defenses that had been turned off slinked awake once more, keeping their processes hidden from the thing creeping across their coding.

This had to be protected. _He_ had to be protected.

Black eyes, hidden behind closed eyelids, swiftly recoded to a glistening golden hue.

Anti-hack measures readied, firewalls geared to reactivate, and the Protocol quickly located the access codes to the security and communications networks operating within their current location. The Protocol waited for a moment longer, held itself behind defensive walls that kept its activation hidden from the robot currently drilling through his systems.

_Enough_.

Zero's hand suddenly snapped up, catching Blues around the throat, and the Reploid shot to his feet, using his grip on Blues' throat to flip over the Robot Master. With a snarl, he shoved the Robot Master to the ground, slamming his head against the exam table, aurulent eyes glaring into the trembling azure that had been revealed as Blues' sunglasses clattered across the floor.

"_Du scheiterte Zeitverschwendung,_" Zero snarled, sharpened canines flashing with the light of the lab overheads.

X backed up a step, eyes going wide at what Zero had just called Blues.

"Do you have any idea how many times Father regretted repairing you, Break? Do you know how much he hated that he rescued you, that he gave you what Light had refused? And how do you thank him? You sided with the _fucking_ _Lightbots_!" His hand tightened around Blues' throat as he linked into the networks, sending out private connection requests to every Reploid currently accessing the systems.

Once the Resistance members had linked to him, he sent a pulse through the system, a signal burst that translated across the network as a high-pitched squeal that sent several of the units tumbling to the floor, gripping at their heads as if their processors were leaking out of their ears.

Cerveau, however, had not been as lucky. He'd refused the connection link, but the Protocol reached for him over the network, grabbed at his local wireless signal, and quickly hacked past all of his defenses, anti-hack mechanisms charging through his systems and attacking his core data, the medical officer quickly offlining and dropping to the floor in a heap.

The security monitoring team had suffered a similar fate. They weren't as disconnected from the network, wired into their monitoring chairs as they were, and each of them slumped over as the Protocol attacked them as well, using their direct links to the system to override their controls and shut them down.

On the surface, Doigt and Autruche only had a half-second's notice before the turrets they'd been repairing starting to open fire.

_Shit. _Blues wasn't sure _how_ he hadn't noticed the Protocol coming online, but none of that mattered at the moment: the Zero unit was beginning an auto-hack on Blues' systems, wearing down at his firewalls while the majority of its attention was focused on the network, on offlining every Reploid on there even though Blues knew that the Protocol would find _only_ Reploids online by now. His distress signal had already gone out.

Blues' azure eyes were wide, but defiant and more than a little weathered, as though he'd seen his fair share of pain in his time. With his sunglasses off, his resemblance to X and Rock was even more profound. Blues' jaw was clamped shut and he redirected his efforts to Zero, focused all of his processor power on _hacking the Protocol right back._

Two could play at this game and, between them, Blues was the one with all the experience.

* * *

><p>Translation (from German):<p>

_Du scheiterte Zeitverschwendung—_You failed waste of time.


	23. Reopening Old Wounds

_The nightmare is only just beginning now that Zero's true personality has been roused from a centuries-long sleep, and his attack dredges up memories long buried in the sands of time. But all is not as it was meant to be for Wily's insane creation as the eldest and youngest of Light's units dare to fight back. _

_And let us not forget the one lurking in the shadows…_

* * *

><p>Shadow knew the second Blues was grabbed and overpowered: he felt it over the network and in their link. His systems surged into full alert—part of him knew what happened, even without Blues' confirmation. A sickened feeling sank into him as he moved in the shadows, positioning himself in Rock's shadow, behind the child. Rock was already frightened, already skittered to the far corner of the room while the unit that X claimed as his 'child' was stunned from the blast that the Protocol sent over the network. Phantom recovered quickly, though, was already blinking and shaking his head as he cleared his processor, so Shadow reached up, deftly seizing the back of Rock's vest and yanking him down into the shadow dimension, catching the child easily despite his weight and quickly shushing him. "Off all networks, now. You will wait here, and you will <em>stay<em> here." Rock understood immediately by Shadow's tone that he was acting in Blues' stead, issuing orders under Blues' authority, so even though he was panicked, frightened out of his mind, and sobbing, he nodded, quickly disengaging from any and all networks—how lonely it felt was _scary_—and bit his lip, trying to quiet his sobs. Shadow rocked him a bit in his arms, taking a few precious moments to reassure the newbuilt before setting him down on what passed for the ground here. "Do not move until I return for you." And with that, he was gone.

Phantom sat up, looked to Rock at the child's first panicked cries, then crumpled against the floor again, shutting his eyes as he tried to clear his processor, clear his thoughts. When he finally looked up again, Rock was _gone_.

Panic settled into his systems for a moment before he bolted for the door, needing to find Blues.

That the lock on the door wasn't engaged had even caught his attention as he moved for the ladder.

* * *

><p>The Protocol saw the motion, felt it across their link, and before Blues could raise his left arm, before it could morph into his buster, the Protocol had Blues pinned against the floor, his face pressed into the cold metal as he drew Blues' left arm behind his back, twisting the limb so that Blues' wrist was pinned against the back of his neck. "Arm your buster, Break," the Protocol taunted. "Arm your buster and <em>blow your fucking head off<em>. It's better than the death Father planned for you." The Protocol laughed, a sinister sound that echoed across the link and cut into Blues' mind. "Do want to know how he wanted me to kill you? Or perhaps," he said, leaning close and lowering his voice, "maybe I should tell you what I plan to do to your _siblings_. Especially that happy little unit you were _so keen_ on helping during the Wars." The unit that had, time and time again, defeated the Protocol's predecessors.

He smirked, laughing again as he continued to fight against Blues' hack. "Or maybe I should go after Light's precious final project," he said, "the one Father told me to save for last." Preferably, if the Protocol had acted according to Wily's designs, X would have had to watch each of his siblings murdered before his eyes. Another signal fired out, this one reaching for the Cyber Elf standing near the lab door.

X recoiled as his defense system screamed online, and he was a little shocked to see his shields pop up on the physical plane. Blue energy coalesced around him as X geared his Hacker capabilities fully online, pulsing fresh energy into the shields as they took the brunt of the mental impact, flickering and shimmering with an opalescent sheen though nothing had actually hit them. "Zero, what are you doing?" X screamed, though with the visor down over his eyes, his view of the android was slightly obscured. "_Zero, let him go!_"

The Protocol frowned, pushed another wave towards X, and growled when the shields deflected the attack again.

"Still helping them," he growled at Blues, pressing harder against the arm he had pinned and using his knee to force it horribly askew, grinning wickedly as he heard the mechanisms in Blues' shoulder mount grind, the wires connecting the arm to the rest of his body snapping. "Don't you ever _learn_, Break Man? Don't you know how to be thankful? No, of course not." The Protocol let go of Blues' left arm, pulling his arm back and punching Blues across the back of the head. "And to think, the most powerful energy source Father ever found got implanted in_ you_. Of all the units he could have given it to, he gave it to an ungrateful little piece of shit, a worthless model that had already been thrown away, discarded like useless trash, _by his own father_."

The Protocol looked to X again, hiding behind the odd shimmering wall of blue. "Did he tell you?" he asked. "Did Break tell you just what it is that's powering him, what it is that he's hiding inside?"

"Quiet, newbuilt," and despite the obvious pain, Blue's voice was still biting and sharp, taking on the exact same tone that he used with Wily's youngest Robot Masters, those that were overconfident and didn't know their place. He'd offlined the shoulder socket, offlined the pain receptors for his left shoulder and side. "Don't go spouting off data that a broken old man spewed at you while you were _still in pieces on his lab table._" Honestly, brandishing that like it was a trophy, like it was something to be _proud_ of? It was data that Wily was beyond happy to tell anyone that would sit down and listen for five minutes. The Protocol only heard so much because he couldn't yet leave the room and be useful.

The Protocol glared down at Blues, redirected his efforts against the flicker he'd sensed in Blues' mind, and forcibly offlined the Robot Master's teleporter. "You're not going _anywhere_," he hissed. "Not in one piece, anyway."

His attention turned back to X. "He's a bomb, you know. That core of his?" And the Protocol laughed again, as if the truth was just that humorous to him. "The core he uses is a crystal Father got from an asteroid. I'm certain you know of human history, know the wars before our time. You remember the bombs they dropped on Japan?" He smirked. "This one's core? _A_ _thousand times stronger_. And Father…Father wanted me to take this one, drag him down into the bottom of the Pacific, and set him to detonate. Imagine the _deaths_ that would have caused, the catastrophe. The lives lost because this one couldn't recognize his place, recognize the one meant to be _his Master_."

There was no warning. In one instant, the Protocol-controlled Zero had Blues pinned to the ground, and the next, there was a metallic _shing_ as the cord was cut and the Protocol was sent tumbling, thrown back by a _very_ precise and measured kick to the chest. Blues didn't move, even as the severed cord fell across his back, and standing over him now was a new Robot Master. He held the appearance of an adult human, taller than Blues or even Zero as he was now. His katana was drawn and held in a defensive posture. His armor was largely black and a dark purple and his face was covered to the nose by a cloth mask. What was most alarming about him, however, wasn't even that he _appeared from the ground_. It was his eyes. They were red as blood.

The Protocol glared at the new arrival, snarled a bit, and slid into a defensive stance. He _knew_ this unit. "Vater würde in Sie enttäuscht sein, Shadow. Welche Art von bedauern-arsch ninja Seiten mit dem _Feind_?"

Shadow frowned at the Protocol, invisible as it was through the mask. "He's already dead and gone. Don't cling so desperately to the will of the deceased." Shadow already moved on, but clearly this newbuilt hadn't wrapped his mind around _that_ concept.

"Father's will was meant to last beyond his own life, beyond that time," the Protocol answered. "We are his _legacy_." While a majority of his focus was directed at Blues and the hack that was continuing across wireless channels, the Protocol started a second hack on Shadow, aiming for the Robot Master's motor controls. He knew that this unit was dangerous if left to his own devices, if allowed to move freely.

The Protocol smirked again, looking back at Blues. "And here Father told me you weren't sentimental," he said to Blues, "and yet you brought the other here, a _newbuilt_ as he is now, and let him remain so close. Why would you risk so much, stay here, when you knew _I_ was here? You know I'll kill him, too. You know I'll destroy him. Perhaps even before I destroy you." He dodged a shuriken, dropping to the floor in a low crouch. "And you," he said, snarling at Shadow, "you're as dead to me, to this world, as all of Light's creations!"

Shadow returned with a hack of his own, but instead of approaching from a new angle, his hack joined hands with Blues', concentrated his efforts in the same place, supporting Blues' efforts to get through the Protocol's many firewalls and into his systems to begin to slow him. Shadow knew that the Protocol was aware of his abilities and while that would normally give anyone an edge, Shadow was in a much heavier weight class, was able to move just as quickly, and, most importantly, Shadow was _armed._ He grit his teeth as he felt the Protocol's hack lay into his own firewalls, felt the Protocol reach into his systems, begin to slow his motor controls.

Shadow looked back at X then, his expression torn between 'what are you standing there for?' and 'make yourself _useful!'_

X's view was still obscured by the visor, but Shadow's look still managed to get through, and his shields glimmered for a moment, and then shifted, glowing a brighter shade of blue. Despite all of the files screaming at him that this was wrong, that this couldn't be happening, X set Zero's energy to read as an enemy unit, bringing his Hacker controls and his own energy to bear on the unit.

He didn't want to fire on Zero if he didn't have to, but he would at least do what he could to help his brother and this Maverick-eyed newcomer.

A new hack paired up with Shadow and Blues, driving deeper into Zero's controls, though X quickly realized his own abilities were far inferior to the two Robot Masters currently laying into the android. If he had any hope of reclaiming Zero, of his family being safe, of his city being reclaimed, this had to stop _here and now_. New energy fired along the mental pathways, assisting the Robot Masters in their attack as X's aura shifted to deep purple, healing energy coiling around Blues. '_Get up!_' X called out to him. '_Blues, c'mon, get up!_'

The Protocol moved to dodge another shuriken, this one still managing to cut a small gash in his left leg. Nanites were immediately dispatched to the area to counter the acid that had been left in the weapon's wake. "You think something so simple can stop me?" he cried, even as another shuriken bit into his other leg. Growling, a systems check confirmed his previous suspicions—this body hadn't been equipped with the virus systems, hadn't been given a means of infecting other units. With that option no longer present…

Phantom skidded to a halt just inside the doorway, and X turned at the sound of his shocked inhalation. "Father—"

"Phantom, _get out of here_!" X cried, feeling the attack only a moment before it struck, his son falling to his knees, hands against his ears.

The Guardian screamed at the mental assault, his own firewalls going up only moments too late to stop the intrusion. His reprogramming defenses kept the attack from doing any serious damage, but the Reploid cried out as he wrestled with the mental attack that was quickly removing him from his motor control mainframe.

Slowly, shakily, Blues pushed himself to his knees, his left arm hanging limply from his shoulder socket, the only thing keeping the limb attached to his body being the synthetic skin. He'd turned the pain sensors off all along that side and while yes, it wouldn't hurt _there_, the strain from suppressing the injury was clouding his processors with an influx of warnings and cascading error messages. And even with X's Nurse abilities helping to restore his systems back toward green, his core was beginning to act up.

It took far too much effort to force himself to his knees, to begin to pivot so he was turned around, his breathing labored to emulate a human in duress. He toppled into a sitting position, leaning against the exam table, thoroughly exhausted by even that little bit of effort. He redoubled his efforts on his mental defenses, fortified his firewalls even as he continued his concentrated, specialized attack at the Protocol's firewall, chewing through layer after layer of defenses—some of them he even recognized as strategies his own systems employed—and with Shadow and X also scrabbling away at the Protocol's defenses, it was only a matter of time. Provided they could hold out that long.

Shadow kept at the Protocol's defenses, but his focus was more on the physical realm, working to use the acid coating his Shadow Blades to physically disable Zero's body, to make it impossible for him to fight. This was a race to see who could get through first, a test to see who could hold out longest. Shadow earnestly hoped that two Robot Masters and an android hacking the Protocol would be sufficient.

X redirected his hack for a moment, lashing out against the hold Zero had on Phantom's systems, reaching out to his son to try and help him get his defenses up against whatever Zero was doing. The minute he felt Phantom's systems respond, locking down against the hack, he disconnected from Phantom, returning his focus to Zero and Blues.

From the way his brother was moving, the stress and pain showing so plainly in the eyes he'd tried so hard to hide, Blues wasn't really faring all that well, and he pushed more energy towards Blues, felt his body start to lose cohesion, and swore under his breath as Zero lashed out against his defensive wall. "Zero, dammit, _stop_!"

"X! Zero isn't in there right now! Direct _all_ of your attention to breaking through him, _then_ worry about the downed units!" the newcomer shouted, not even looking back at X as he summoned more blades to his hands (did he have an endless supply?) and threw them at the Protocol in quick succession.

The Protocol grunted, one knee impacting against the ground as the acid bit into his leg, the motor controls starting to falter as the nanites struggled to get the damage under control, to repair him, to get him back on his feet, and he focused all of his attention on Blues, drove himself through the firewalls. All he had to do was rewrite this one's coding, make him unable to resist…

Blues lashed out at the Protocol that much harder, matching it tit-for-tat, clearly displaying his sad experience with trying desperately to protect his mind. That the cord was cut and that very, _very_ intimate link severed only meant that the Protocol would have a much harder time getting through Blues' defenses, through his firewalls, and into his programming.

Blues knew that if the Protocol got a hold of him, overwrote him to be a voiceless slave, that it would be game over not just for himself, but for everyone in this base, for Shadow, and for Rock. For Neo Arcadia, for everything.

The hack was drilling closer and closer and _it hurt_, hurt in a way that he couldn't disable, couldn't turn off. He knew he wouldn't be able to keep his arm offline indefinitely, not if he wanted to keep other things offline, but with things as they were…he just needed to _push_. Just a little bit further, just a little bit harder. The Protocol was down now, was on his knees, just a little bit more…

And Shadow descended on the Protocol, slashing him viciously across the back, giving him a good dose of the acid. He knew that Blues wouldn't last much longer and if he fell, then Shadow would be forced to retreat, provided that option was still open. If Blues fell, then Rock became Shadow's responsibility, and he would _not_ fail in that.

"_Ich kann es mir nicht erlauben zu fallen! Ich können nicht scheitern mein Vater!_" the Protocol screamed, trying desperately to get back to his feet, trying to fight against the fact that his central sensory and motor control line was under direct assault from the acid. He couldn't control it anymore—his hold on Phantom, tenuous though it had been, faltered; his efforts against Blues' firewalls met with far too much resistance; his body was ready to give out, nanites unable to keep up with the acid with his concentration so divided, eating through his body faster than he could repair himself. Without the virus to power him, to fuel him…

The Protocol screamed, an animalistic cry of vehement rage, and sprang for Blues.

Shadow whirled around, shimmered, and disappeared from where he was standing, only to spring up in the Protocol's path, already mid-kick as he impacted the unit again. Shadow grappled him, forced him down, easily able to overpower the Protocol now that its body was faltering far more quickly than the hack was breaking through anything in Shadow's systems. With a final push, Blues at last broke through the encryptions, through the defenses, and issued a shutdown order.

As Zero's body crumpled to the floor, X froze. He didn't know whether to move for Blues, for Phantom, or for Zero; all of them needed him, needed his help…but Blues, by far, was the worst of the three, and X moved next to him, dropped to the floor, halo shimmering red, as he wrapped his arms around Blues as best he could, pouring everything he had into providing comfort and healing energy into his brother's body. He would have scanned him, queried his systems for what was wrong, but at that point, it was more likely that he'd get a response by asking what _wasn't_ wrong. Focusing his energy around Blues' core, he fought to settle it, pushed himself to help calm it. Especially now that he knew what it was.

But answers for all the questions would come later. His brother needed him now.

"Fa…Father," Phantom said, struggling to his feet as his systems reoriented. "Father, I…I lost Uncle Rock. I…whatever that was on the network…I looked up…I saw him, blinked, and…and…he was gone." Eyes wandered to the unit that had just taken down Zero. "Who…who are you?"

Blues was _trembling_. It was very slight, very minimal, but his breathing was choppy and his entire frame was trembling. He didn't actually look at X, eyes hazy and unfocused as he concentrated on his systems, on his mind, on his defenses, trying to gather the pieces up and put himself back together. A harder tremor ran down his spine and his breathing hitched, as though in pain.

Shadow's attention was focused on Blues as well, even though X was already doing…something…that was restorative. But when Phantom addressed him, Shadow turned to look at the Reploid, his right eye closed, his left scrutinizing. "Rock is safe. Stay seated until your systems stabilize." Then he turned toward Blues again, walked over easily, and knelt, producing a blue can of some sort.

Blues almost grimaced, but he took it with his good hand; Shadow had already cracked it open. It took him a few moments to steady enough to drink it himself, but he was not going to be tolerating anyone feeding him like he was an injured bird.

With that, Shadow turned toward his youngest brother's prone body with a tired sigh. He pondered Zero for several moments, analyzing him and determining the best way to lift him without causing further damage. He knew that Blues was still in Zero's systems, was working feverishly to corrupt the Omega Protocol, working feverishly to wipe it clean, to ensure everyone's survival. Shadow lifted Zero onto one of the lab tables, laying him out somewhat neatly, seeming to keep one eye on Blues the entire time.

"You took him?" Phantom asked. "How? I was in the room…I only looked away…" The confusion was evident in his voice, on his face. He rubbed at his head, looked to the prone form on the table. "Father, _what happened_?"

Blues was still drinking, though he was in no condition to be speaking. Shadow took a position to Blues' left and to the side a bit, looking to X curiously before turning his attention back to Phantom. "It was imperative that Rock not…be here, or online, and experience this. I ensured he'd be hidden, that he'd not be tracked down."

"I…I don't understand. How did you get Rock _out of the room_ without me seeing or hearing you?" Nothing should have gotten past Phantom so easily. "You're one them, aren't you?" he asked. "But…you're Maverick."

"I was in the room_ the entire time_," Shadow returned evenly. And Phantom never noticed. None of them had. Though Blues was the only other unit he'd met that could detect him with any regularity, and even that wasn't reliable. "And what do you mean by 'Maverick'?"

"Your eyes," Phantom said, scooting a bit away from the unit. "Your eyes are red. Only Mavericks have red eyes."

Now Shadow stared at him, his right eye remaining closed. "I was _built_ with red eyes," along with many of his brothers. Was that really such a shock?

It was X who spoke up. "Around the time of the first Maverick War, over two centuries ago, red was outlawed as an eye color option for Reploids. It was still available, but with the implications?" He curled into Blues, hoping he was helping, sending a communications request through the link. Was his brother even in a condition where he could talk? "The virus reset a Reploid's coding for their eyes to display red. It was one of the few physical signs we got before a unit went Maverick." Though he didn't look to either unit, his attention focused on Phantom. "He's older than that, Phantom. He's like Rock and Blues," though X's defense system had him marked as an enemy unit, one of Wily's Robot Masters. That truth hadn't unnerved X any less, though, to actually _see_ a red-eyed unit on the base.

Blues paused mid-sip on the E-Can, then shook his head slightly, denying the linking request. No, he really couldn't cope with that, not at the moment. He was still working on Zero, still working on getting his own systems online. He was still shaking, though not nearly as hard and his firewalls were in _shambles_. His processors were giving him a splitting headache and although X's efforts had calmed his core somewhat, it was still far, far into the red. He felt dizzy, his left arm was completely useless, and he doubted he'd be able to support his own weight even if he tried.

"Is there any way I can help?" X asked, looking to Blues, then Shadow. "I need to help, but without a link, I don't know _how_."

Shadow turned to look at X, then Blues, frowning under the mask. "His core will settle after a few minutes. He…" Shadow hesitated, stepping a bit closer to Blues. "It'll take a few minutes," the Robot Master said finally, eyeing Blues' shoulder. That? That would not take a few minutes. It'd been a _long_ time since he'd last seen the unit so disabled. And Blues was not going to be spending any extra time in the medical lab here, especially not after this fiasco.

X looked at Blues again, nodding after a moment; his abilities were needed elsewhere. Floating along the floor, X moved to hover near Cerveau, pushing energy into him, healing his processor and trying to help the medical officer reboot. There were going to be a lot more patients in the room if Cerveau's condition and the lack of response from the rest of the base was any indication.

Zero groaned, shifted on the table, and took a shuddering breath…

Shadow rounded on Zero immediately, tapping a newly summoned shuriken to his lip before lightly slicing along Zero's throat. There was a flash of light as it sparked, discharging into Zero's neural network and knocking him back out.

"What was that?" X asked, still trying to get Cerveau online again. Shifting to Hacker, he wormed his way into the medic's processor, checked his status logs and, with a shrug, kicked his initialization procedures into gear.

"Until Break Man completes the corruption of the Omega Protocol, this unit will remain offline," Shadow said, and it sounded a bit like he was reiterating an order even though Blues hadn't made a sound since talking to the Protocol. He was sitting, leaning forward slightly, almost curling in on himself, still sifting through his own cascade of error messages and working on Zero.

Cerveau groaned and his eyes opened, his optics refocusing for several moments before the medic pushed himself into a sitting position, holding his head in one hand, looking around hazily. "Master X…? What…what happened?"

"We had a bit of an incident, Cerveau," X said. "I know I said a lot of things about Zero, about who he was, but…" X bit his bottom lip, looked down. "I never told anyone here that he was very closely tied in to the Maverick Wars, to what started them. He…was built around the same time I was, but he wasn't meant to be like me. We…Blues, I mean, tried to ensure that we'd never have to deal with Zero the way he was _meant _to be, but something went wrong. His original protocol was activated and he…_it_ attacked the base. Are you okay?" he asked, trying to change the topic. "Your systems are checking out okay?"

"That was _Master Zero_?" Phantom asked, disbelieving.

"No, that was not," Shadow cut in before the conversation could get out of hand. He was standing nearer to Zero's lab table now, keeping one eye on his youngest brother and the other on Blues' condition. His mind's eye? Was on Rock. "And once we finish here, that…entity…will not be paying anyone a visit again." Which was optimal.

Cerveau's gaze lingered on Shadow for several moments, though he was unable to see his eye color from his vantage point. Master X didn't seem too alarmed by this unit's presence, so it had to be okay for him to be here, but his armor style was a bit…was he another Robot Master?

"C'mon, Cerveau. I…I need to start going around the base, seeing who needs help." X stood, floating a bit off the floor. "There's likely more units like you that are going to need to be rebooted and I figure it might be better to have our medical officer there to give me a hand." Seeing as he couldn't actually touch them.

Phantom pushed himself to his feet before bowing respectfully to the newcomer unit. "I apologize about my previous misunderstanding. I…I was not aware. But what was that, if not Master Zero?"

"Master X, with all due respect, I'd think it best if you stayed here," and Cerveau motioned around the lab, but by his expression, he really meant here, with his family and Zero. Blues was…not at all okay, and Cerveau couldn't even be sure he knew how to tell with Robot Masters, but that unit looked ready to _pass out_. Phantom was immensely confused and once Zero woke…

X nodded after a moment, agreeing with the Reploid. "See to the others." He moved for the door with Cerveau, but knelt at Phantom's side. "Phantom, how did he get through your firewalls so quickly?" Hands reached to brush through the Guardian's hair, but passed through it. "What were you trying to do?"

"My firewalls and defensive programs weren't all running," and why would they have to be? Phantom was safe here, had friends and family and people that he would be working with. There shouldn't have been a threat to them here.

Had four years under the copy's rule really made Phantom that complacent, that reckless? "Phantom, you know better than to have your firewalls down. You've got my defensive systems, but they're no good when they're _off_."

Shadow and Blues were both staring at Phantom with matching expressions of offended disbelief. He'd turned his firewalls _off_? Did Phantom have a _death wish_? Blues' face was pale, the bags under his eyes more pronounced, and he didn't even turn his head to look fully at Phantom, loathe to expend the effort to move when he was in so much pain, when his systems were in such disarray.

"You came up here after Rock disappeared, knowing something was wrong, without using stealth and _with your firewalls down_?" Shadow could only stare: was this kid serious? Shadow glanced to Blues then, his look of shock only magnifying. "And that was _after_ Break Man instructed you to _keep them up not matter what?_" Shadow closed his eyes and shook his head slightly. "It's terrible what passes for a ninja these days," and that was a sigh afterward, even as Shadow turned to check Zero's status again.

Phantom looked to the floor, embarrassed. The motion, however, brought a familiar item into view, and he knelt down, grabbing Blues' sunglasses from the floor. "I thought…no one has been able to pose a threat to us across wireless channels," he explained. "I didn't realize that a wireless link was just as dangerous as a wired one. The connection usually doesn't run as deep." He stepped closer to Shadow and Blues, handing the shades to Blues.

Blues had to put the E-Can down to take the sunglasses, but he did accept them, his hand no longer shaking as he managed something of a smirk, though it did nothing to hide the immense pain in his eyes.

It was like how X looked when he was thinking back on the wars, on his worst memories.

"You Reploids are immune to reprogramming, it is true," Shadow said, even as he watched Phantom's movements intently, "but you're not remotely immune to other modes of inflicting damage." And Shadow had no idea why they'd think they couldn't be hacked, cracked open, or corrupted.

"I know," Phantom said. "I just thought…this isn't like the city. Here, the people, this resistance, they're not out to hurt or destroy you. Even if I hadn't known about what Zero was," still was confused about it, "I thought I was safe."

Shadow was about to inform Phantom that it was never safe, but Blues shifted where he was sitting, picking the E-Can back up, the sunglasses placed to the side. "Go ahead and administer the antidote," Blues said, his voice coming out quiet and more than a little shaky. He closed his eyes for a moment, as though gathering himself. He withdrew completely from Zero now that the work was done, now that the Protocol was permanently corrupted.

Now that the damage had already been done. And Blues blamed himself for it.

Shadow bowed, then turned back to Zero, looking down at him and tilting his head slightly as he transmitted the descrambler for Zero and the startup initialization order.

Zero came online slowly, groaning and shielding his eyes as if his optics had been set for a much darker room, and his arm came up to shield his eyes. A moment later, he shot upright, ebony eyes wide, and collapsed off the far side of the exam table. Scrambling backwards, he tucked himself into the nearest corner, curled down into as small a lump as he could manage, tears trailing down his face by the time he managed a shaky, "I didn't mean it, Break!"

His voice cracked as his eyes finally focused, falling on Blues, then up to the Wilybot standing nearby. "Shadow, I didn't mean it. I didn't even know…I couldn't tell it was…" Zero shuddered, tried to make himself smaller, and fell silent.

Zero's falling off the table and his sudden, jerky movements startled Blues and brought his systems back into full alert.

And then they registered that Blues was _completely unarmed_. No buster, no teleporter, one arm completely useless, and he couldn't even stand.

That was enough to send him careening back into the red and he lurched forward suddenly, almost collapsing onto the floor as his good hand dropped the E-Can. His core's energy spiked and his body shuddered with the power output, spines of energy digging their way through his already strained systems. He groaned and clutched at his chest, toggling through displays, trying to find what combination would make him look least vulnerable.

There really wasn't a good combination at this point.

Shadow whirled around and went to Blues, placing one hand on his shoulder and pushing him back into an upright position, already knowing there was nothing they _could_ do for Blues when he was like this except try to keep him comfortable until it passed.

That Shadow was acting as a physical barrier between Blues and Zero helped. Slightly.  
>Zero's panic magnified at Blues' sudden shift, and he whimpered. "I didn't…Shadow, tell me I didn't get the hack through. Don't tell me I did to him what Light and Wily did back then."<p>

Were it not for Zero's comment, X would have been right back at Blues' side, providing him with healing energy to try and restabilize his core. But what Light _and_ Wily had done?

If X could have retched, he probably would have. He looked to Shadow. "Is there any way I can help? I have healing abilities in this form—you've seen me use them—but…should I centralize on his core, or is there something else?" Since he couldn't get a scan, Shadow was X's best bet for knowing how he could help Blues.

It took Shadow a moment to respond, but he answered X first. "His core. That's what's making him seize." Shadow looked back to Zero then, scanning the android, even as he huddled in the corner, clearly trying to look as nonthreatening as possible. "The hack…didn't break his firewalls. But you managed to wreak other havoc on his systems. Just…stay there, and be still. This will take a few minutes."

X knelt down next to Blues, closing his eyes as he set up a stasis field around Blues, the soft red glow encircling the Robot Master, wrapping him in a transparent cocoon of healing energy. Within the field, X concentrated the energy flow around Blues' core, trying to soothe the troubled crystal that was lancing power through his brother's body.

"Break…Proto…" Zero muttered, voice broken and soft, "I'm…I'm sorry."

This was part of why someone always kept an eye on Blues when he raided Wily's lab, Shadow mused. If he had an attack there and Wily actually found him? Even the Wilybots that didn't like him didn't want that for him. When Blues lurched again, Shadow leaned forward, pushing him back to rest against the side of the exam table, trying to at least keep him upright while he sorted his systems out. X's efforts were having a measureable effect on Blues, and after about thirty seconds, he was able to sit up on his own again, although he was holding his head with his good hand. Shadow knew from his status readings that he had a splitting headache, and that was the least of his pains.

That shoulder joint was still offline.

Zero had a million questions burning through his processor, but he remained silent, trembling in his corner.

Phantom was worried for everyone in the room, but to see Zero as broken as he was? The Guardian moved for Zero, shocked and stopping in his tracks when the blonde recoiled at the motions, shifting a bit away from the corner to keep the distance between him and Phantom. "Zero…?"

"Leave him be for now," X said. "Go find Cerveau. Help him get the rest of the base back on their feet. And please, Phantom, get your firewalls and defenses back online. _All_ of them." Just because the base was home didn't necessarily mean that home was _safe_.

Phantom looked to his father, looked as if he were going to protest, but then nodded and left the room.

It was another minute or two before Blues moved again. He shifted, his hand dropping to the ground beside him. "Thank you, X," the worst of the pain was over and although he hurt _everywhere_, it wasn't so excruciating that his body was locking up and wanting to curl into the fetal position. He'd gotten through only about half of the error messages, but that much was already a vast improvement, so Blues finally reached out over the link to X, permitting it should X still want to.

X only set the link for communications; he didn't dare look at Blues' systems right after an attack, especially as bad as that one had seemed. '_Is there anywhere else you'd like me to focus?_' he asked, though he maintained the steady thrum of his power over Blues' core.

'…_Your ability is helping, so just keep on the core,_' Blues said, his voice laden with pain even over their link. '_It's cascading errors in my systems. Once…once the core stabilizes, everything else will even out,_' straight back to his not-baseline. Blues was withdrawn, more so than even before. Withdrawn and on guard.

And kicking himself for thinking that staying here would ever _work_.

Shadow stepped back, eyeing Blues, scanning him, then nodding to himself. "Excuse me for a moment," he said as he took a step back, into a particularly dark shadow, and _disappeared_.

X sighed as he nuzzled Blues, querying him via their link to ensure that his proximity and the electrical discharge he gave off wasn't bothering the Robot Master. He altered his Nurse energy, pulling the net of energy closer to Blues' core, working to cage it once more within a shell of healing energy, soothe the lancing power surges that had been tearing Blues' systems apart.

He would have given anything at that moment just to be able to _actually hold_ his brother.

No, that discharge didn't bother Blues, though the sensation was rather novel. His eyes were still open, and he would glance up and around whenever anyone moved, keeping close tabs on who was where in the room. In all honesty, considering his mental state, considering the _memory logs_ that were replaying over and over in his mind's eye, having X so near was reassuring. And even though he knew that the Protocol was gone, that Zero wasn't that entity, he tensed up every time the Wilybot so much as twitched.

Blues wasn't really up for speaking aloud, so instead he fortified his link with X, reassuring the android that yes, he was helping and yes, he was appreciated.

Part of Blues wanted to just lock these damn memories away, but he couldn't afford losing the memory, losing the lesson. He could not afford that, especially not with Rock as he was.

There was a feeling whenever Shadow materialized, Blues thought, a vague feeling of something being off. He'd heard humans speak of feeling like the hairs on the back of their necks were standing up. It wasn't so creepy to Blues, especially once he identified the source, but it still left a nagging sensation, as though he'd forgotten to do something.

Shadow reappeared beside Blues, Rock sobbing uncontrollably in his arms. One of Shadow's hands was rubbing the child's back and the Robot Master hesitated, determining the best way to hand Rock off to Blues when Blues had use of only one arm. After a moment, he bent down, shifting Rock in his arms and depositing him feet-first on the ground directly in front of Blues. They were reaching to each other before Rock even hit the ground.

Rock fell to his knees and collapsed into Blues, sobbing all the harder when he registered why Blues wasn't reaching out with both arms. The older Robot Master enclosed Rock in his embrace anyway, shifting the child into a more comfortable position. Quietly, he shushed Rock, letting him sniffle all over his scarf. '_Ssh, it's alright now._'

'_You're hurt,_' Rock sobbed, half-muffled by the scarf.

'_It's nothing that can't be repaired._' Even if it was…unlikely he'd have a full repair done in the foreseeable future.

'_Your head is hurt, and that can't be repaired._'

That gave Blues some pause, opening his mouth as though to speak, even though no sound came out. Of course Rock would feel the mental damage, even if he hadn't been on the network to feel it being done to Blues. He'd granted the child access without a second thought: denying him would have made it far, far worse. The last thing Rock needed was to feel rejected and isolated. The time alone in the shadow space had been upsetting enough. '_It is something that can be…adjusted to,_' Blues said carefully. It was something he'd adjusted to before, again and again.

Rock shook his head: adjusting to something wasn't repairing it, wasn't making it right. '_I—I should have…_' Should have done _something_. He knew he'd have done more than be hidden away and cry once. He knew that once, he'd have _killed_ anyone who tried to do that to Blues. But now…he was so terrified he couldn't move. He was still terrified.

'_You did precisely what you should have. You did well,_' Blues cut Rock off before he could continue down that line of thought: if Rock had appeared there, with his memories fragmented as they were…

No, it was well worth it to have had the child far away from all of that.

Zero's eyes went wide when he saw the state Rock was in, realized that what he'd done (even if he hadn't really been in control) hadn't hurt just Break. He saw the three Lightbots on the floor, remembered what his father, his creator, had wanted to happen to each of them, and he whimpered, a nonsensical sound that carried all the fear he had for what he was supposed to have become. "Sh…Shadow," Zero called to his brother, "please. My room. Get me away. I…I can't…" He tried to scoot further back, further away, and he whined again when his motions only pushed him harder against the wall.

Shadow looked back to Zero when he called to him, looked at the android's face, at how absolutely _terrified_ he was of what the Protocol had done. He nodded and turned to approach Zero. He'd have asked for a link, but by what his basic scans were showing, Zero would outright reject any contact with others right now. He was in shock. Shadow bent down and offered Zero one of his hands: contact was required. But at least this way, Zero would be able to process what just happened and hopefully separate his perception of himself from the Protocol.

Zero flinched when Shadow reached for him, but finally let one arm raise, the limb shuddering as he grabbed Shadow's hand with one of his own. "I'm…I'm sorry, Shadow. Please, brother…get me away…and keep Break and his family safe."

In a flicker, Zero and Shadow disappeared. After several moments of guiding Zero to where he needed to be, the two of them reemerged in Zero's room, Shadow still watching Zero carefully. With half his face covered, it was hard to see that he was worried about Zero and not mistrusting of him. "You're in shock," Shadow began, not entirely certain how to coax the android to calm down.

Zero moved to the nearest available corner in his room, which just so happened to be the corner the bed was tucked into, and curled up into a ball. His wireless signal lashed out, linked into the door in a panicked frenzy, and he quickly uploaded Rock's locking program to the security system on the door, ramping the difficulty up until there were over two hundred layers of encryption keeping the door sealed. He turned his eyes to Shadow once he was done, and there was blue bleeding into the obsidian orbs as the tears began to fall. "Pro…protect them," he said, wrapping his arms around his legs and curling into himself as much as he could. "Don't need to stay here," Zero managed through his tears.

Shadow turned to Zero, frowning slightly under his mask. Instead of leaving, Shadow sat down in the chair in the room. "They are _fine_. Proto Man is being quiet right now, but the Protocol did _not_ break through his firewalls. There was no lasting harm done. _You_, Zero, you hurt_ no one._ Do not mistake this: that Protocol was not you."

"Father meant that to be me," he replied. "And what does it matter if that was me or the Protocol? _This body_ nearly killed Break Man. My _mind_ caged me, forced me to submit, to destroy them, to destroy the people that have done nothing but help me, and this…_this fucking body was ready and willing to kill you_!" How did Shadow not see? It may not have been him, but it was still part of him that did this, that hurt them, that attacked the base. "Go!" he screamed, hugging himself in a desperate attempt to keep from screaming until he destroyed his vocal processor. One hand tangled into his hair as he pressed his face against his knees, not even caring about the cold press of his leg armor against his forehead.

A moment later, the realization struck, and Zero offlined his wireless capabilities, fully disconnecting himself from the base's networks. "_Go!_" he screamed again.

Shadow moved to where Zero's saber and pistol were resting on a small table and gathered them up. "I will return to check on you," Shadow informed Zero. He'd be back, whether Zero liked it or not. Armaments in hand, Shadow stepped into the shadow cast by the table and disappeared.

As soon as Shadow left, the moment he was truly by himself in the room, Zero let the tears fall in earnest.

What had he _done_?

* * *

><p>Rock was snuggled into Blues, clinging to him desperately as though he'd just woken from a horrible nightmare. Except in Rock's case, the nightmare really happened. He was still upset, would quiet for a few minutes before bursting into fresh tears, hiding his face in Blues' scarf the entire time. Blues was really hurt this time, honestly was, he could have been killed and Rock would have been able to do <em>nothing<em>. Nothing but let Shadow take him and abandon this base. Without Blues, with nothing to remember him by but his memories, fractured as they were.

That thought sent Rock into a fresh bout of sobs, shoulders shaking, head pounding.

X moved a bit, resituated himself so that one arm was around Blues, the other close around Rock, and though he kept part of his focus around maintaining the shield on Blues' core, a second net of healing energy curled around the trio. X smiled a bit as he leaned his head towards Rock, sending a communications link request through his defense program, hoping to push as much comfort and love through that tenuous connection as he could manage.

Rock immediately accepted the prompt, reaching to X and fortifying their link in one motion, then clinging to him over their connection just as desperately as he clung to Blues. Rock didn't have the foresight to hide any of his emotional state (why hide?), so X could clearly see just how frightened and upset the little Robot Master was. He was terrified, honestly terrified, for Blues' well-being and even though the eldest of them was continually reassuring Rock, the child wasn't buying it.

Because Blues was _not_ okay.

X pushed as much comfort as he could manage through to Rock, letting his hand dance over the Robot Master's back in soothing circles, even as odd as the motions probably felt, X being as he was. He reassured Rock that, yes, Blues wasn't as okay as he usually was, but X was helping him heal, doing what he could to make sure that the eldest of their family would be able to (eventually) return to his baseline.

'_Like all things,_' X offered with a smile, '_it's just going to take a little time._'

Rock trembled again, clutching at the front of Blues' trench coat. Blues was running his fingers through the child's hair soothingly, using both physical cues and their communication over the link to calm him, to bring him back down from his panic.

"I—I should have…" The child's voice was shaky and Blues' sigh was tired.

"You did what you should have." Obeyed Blues' orders and Shadow's alike and stayed well out of the Protocol's reach. Blues' voice was strained and quiet, though there was some color returning to his face now and his tremors had all but stopped. "Just relax," it wasn't good to be this upset, not for either of them, and Blues didn't want Rock to feel like it had to be his responsibility to fight, not again. Especially not when Rock hated fighting so much.

Shadow stepped back into the lab then, carrying Zero's weaponry in one arm, "He's in his room now, though he applied a locking algorithm set to his door. I took his weapons with me," because, honestly? With his mental state as it was, Zero shouldn't be allowed within five hundred feet of a _butter knife_.

X looked up, and the worry fired through his links to Blues and Rock without his consent. Sighing, X turned from Shadow, looked to his eldest brother, and asked across their connection if it was okay to change Shadow's designation in the defense system to one that would allow X to link with him.

Because if Shadow had felt it necessary to remove Zero's weapons, things were a lot worse with the android than X originally thought.

Blues gave his consent to X to upgrade Shadow's designation from hostile to something more friendly, then reached out to both Rock and X to try and reassure them, though coming from him with his health so poor, he didn't know how effective he was being. Rock responded by hugging him tighter. "Check in on him every few hours," Blues told Shadow, shifting slightly to allow Rock to snuggle into his neck. The child was carefully avoiding touching or jostling Blues' bad arm, but he glanced at it every so often, worry written over his features.

X's systems were a bit of a flurry as he reset the Wilybot's designation, immediately reaching out to Shadow and requesting a communications link. He made sure, however, to keep his energy coiling around his brothers, wishing for a moment that he could do something more for Blues' arm. He hadn't missed the way that Rock kept looking at the damaged limb and, as an afterthought, queried Blues' system to provide a damage report for the joint.

After a moment, Blues relinquished the damage report, sending it over to X. It wasn't like this was an injury he could realistically hide.

Shadow blinked, but accepted the communications request, limiting X to speaking over the link only: no deeper. He wasn't sure that Rock taught X much in the way of manners in the way Robot Masters link and he was certain Blues hadn't. Pushing for a deeper link would be taking advantage, not to mention rude.

X smiled a bit as the link established, turning his eyes to Shadow as he continued to hold close to his brothers. '_I'm surprised you're not querying for a status update or something,_' he said, '_but that aside, how bad off is Zero that you removed his weapons? And what did you mean he applied a locking algorithm to his door?_'

Now it was Shadow's turn to smile, in person and over the link, '_I didn't think that they told you much of manners with these things. I'm not querying you for a status update because that's…we don't have the same maker, aren't technically a part of the same web. It'd be rude and presumptuous for me to ask,_' though Shadow wouldn't be offended if X had queried him; the android was clearly still getting used to it. '_Zero's in an advanced state of shock, but requested to be alone. I will check him hourly,_' though Shadow wouldn't make himself known. '_In his current mental state, I do not…trust him to be left alone with weaponry. He's blaming himself._'

X had to fight to keep from frowning; this wasn't the first time Zero had taken to negative news in a bad way. He'd reacted quite similarly in the wake of the Nightmare Incident when he'd recognized the unique way the Nightmare program pulled at his systems. When Lifesaver had brought it up that he was under suspicion for being Maverick before his retirement after the Eurasia impact, Zero had dove into his memory files, had managed to make some sense of the memories that had come to him of his maker back then, and spent two weeks tearing up whatever enemies he could in the simulator and out on missions just to keep from ripping his room apart.

'_This isn't the first time I've seen him react badly to…particular things about himself being brought to light,_' X admitted. '_I'm thankful that you're willing to keep an eye on him, but it would probably be for the best to only observe. Last time something like this happened…_' And X physically facepalmed, groaning. '_You're probably going to find everything in his room trashed by the time you get back in there,_' he said, '_especially if the locking algorithm you mentioned is Rock's, the one I gave him._'

'_Rock's? Ah, the one he gave you. He doesn't want any contact with anyone—he came off the network and blocked communications and I don't see any of the Reploids here opening that door, he dialed it as high as the program would go. Either way, my intention was to watch unless…unless he did something that required intervention._' Like trying to permanently damage himself.

Blues queried Shadow about what X was facepalming for, knowing the two were talking by now, and frowned when Shadow answered. What would trashing his room do? Rock was looking up and around worriedly, as though expecting something else bad to pop up and hurt them, and Blues put his hand on the back of the child's head and coaxed him to relax again, let him snuggle, reassured him that they were safe, the bad thing was gone.

X sighed as he leaned closer to Blues, asking him if he wanted the shielding to remain on his core after X stopped pushing fresh energy into his systems or if he'd be okay if X just let the restorative net dissipate.

He reassured Rock, told him that it was something else, something unrelated, that had bothered him, and pushed love and support through to his brother.

'_Thank you,_' he sent to Shadow.

'_You can dissipate the net; you should reserve your strength. The ones here are going to be clamoring for answers,_' and hell if Blues was doing another 'Q&A' session with the Resistance. Rock was mostly calm now, opting to instead cling to Blues as though afraid he'd disappear if Rock let go for even a second. Blues sent an affectionate feeling over his link with Rock before continuing with X, '_I know that you must have questions. However…I will answer what I can after I've had some time._'

'_That didn't technically answer my first question,_' X fired back, letting the secondary net around the three of them dissolve even as he set the shield to hold for another few hours around Blues' core before it, too, would dispel. '_And I do have a lot of questions, but…if it's alright by you, I'd prefer to talk to Shadow about that, especially since…since he's Zero's brother. You need to get some rest and Rock is probably best with you right now,_' especially as tight as he was clinging to Blues. '_I'll stop by tomorrow morning, unless that's too early. I just…_' He wanted to make sure that Zero was alright; Blues was incredibly stubborn about taking care of himself, and Rock probably wouldn't be leaving Blues' side for the better part of a week, it seemed. '_I'll do what I can about the Resistance. It's going to be hell trying to explain so much about Zero's history,_' so difficult because of how much more X knew than Zero, and Zero's current sequestration wouldn't help any when it came to people wanting answers from _him_.

'_That's fine; Shadow was…very present during Zero's construction,_' though Blues was a bit surprised: he hadn't necessarily meant X's questions about _Zero_. But this being his focus might work out better for Blues. '_I…you can come by tomorrow morning._' Even if Blues wasn't up, Rock would be and he thought some interaction would be good for him.

Even though he knew that Rock wouldn't leave his side for anything.

A soft nod, and X rubbed his hand over Rock's back again before pulling away. "It's best if you two get some rest. It's been…it's been a trying day. I'll come see you tomorrow, Rock, and we can play with your lock program again, okay?" X looked to Shadow. "If you don't mind taking them to Blues' room, I'm going to find Cerveau and Phantom and see if I can help." He stopped for a moment, then got to his feet. "Please stay out of sight for now. Cerveau won't mention you to anyone, and Phantom's probably still too embarrassed about what happened to say anything about you, but I'd rather be able to talk to the Resistance first. As my son mentioned, your eye color will be…disconcerting to a lot of those here."

And over the link, he said, '_Once things settle down, I'll let you know, if that's alright. I'd like to talk to you at some point today. About what happened…and some of the things that Zero mentioned during this…incident._'

'_I won't close this channel out, so let me know when you're ready to talk,_' Shadow said amicably even as he bent down over Blues and Rock and somehow detached Rock. Still squatting, he lifted the child and settled him against his side, held by one arm, then stood up, offering a hand to Blues to help him up.

Rock was holding the sunglasses and he managed a soft smile to X, "I'll help you if you're stuck with the locks."

Blues had a harder time standing, but wouldn't allow Shadow to actually lift him. He swayed slightly, but held his own, and the darkness crept over them as they disappeared from the med lab.

X took a deep breath, centered himself, and strode from the lab, halo glimmering red.

He still had a lot of work to do.

* * *

><p>X let out a heavy sigh as he finally managed to get Dande back online, Cerveau at the security monitor's side the minute he actually started moving again.<p>

It was a relief that Dande finally regained consciousness, they were running out of ideas for waking him. "How are you feeling?" He bent down and put a hand on the Reploid's shoulder to steady him, running scans on Dande's systems, the results displaying on the inside of his visor.

"A bit disoriented and my left audio receptor is offline, Cerveau-sensei," he said, tapping the side of his helmet for a moment before actually removing the item, optics taking a moment to focus. "What happened?" he asked, looking to X.

"I'm actually going to get on the network as soon as everyone's back up and okay," X replied. "I'm starting to wonder if we're ever going to have a quiet day around here again." Since the raid on Neo Arcadia a week and a half ago, it had been an almost nonstop roller coaster of events from there on out.

Cerveau shifted to Dande's left side, running a deeper scan on the Reploid's head case, documenting whatever they picked up. "I don't see any physical damage from these scans; it may have booted improperly. Try rebooting it?" Sometimes, wires got crossed and resetting them did wonders for restoring them to functionality.

Dande nodded, restarted the receptor, and nodded a moment later. "Thank you," he said. Leaning over, he keyed a sequence on the keyboard in his chair, loading up a few status screens. "Has anyone heard from Doigt or Autruche?" he asked. "They were topside fixing the turrets when I was offlined." Looking around the room, Dande quickly corrected himself. "They were topside when we were offlined." Grabbing his helmet, he dropped the item back onto his head, linking into the unit and getting back to work.

Sentinella responded. "They provided a report shortly after we were brought back online," she said. "The turrets opened fire on them, but whatever it was that happened to us after Master Zero linked us, they had refused the connection."

X shook his head. Their refusal had likely saved their lives, especially since it seemed as if the turrets had been set to ignore the transponders the Resistance members carried. "Sec team, bring the turrets offline and leave them that way. We need to have Rocinolle look over the coding to make sure the transponders haven't been compromised."

"Understood, Commander," a few of the team responded.

At least they got right back to work, X thought. Everyone else?

Cerveau was having a lot of trouble getting people logged back onto the net. After what happened, X really couldn't blame them for wanting to stay away.

* * *

><p>The second Shadow dropped them off in their room, Blues fortified the lock on the door—again—and went for the bed. He knew that Rock wouldn't be able to open the door, but he wanted to make damn well sure no one would be coming in that he didn't want here.<p>

His core was just barely behaving, his processors were screaming, his arm was…it made him think of the war with King, of the injuries he'd sustained then. At least King hadn't tried to _reprogram _him.

He couldn't cancel it this time. He couldn't ignore it this time.

He _needed _to offline. He'd be completely unaware for the duration. The thought made him _sick_.

Rock was trying to reassure Blues, pointing out the door and how they couldn't get in. How Shadow could easily remove him if something unexpected happened. How Rock would stay here and keep Blues company and stay out of trouble. He needed to charge anyway, so they could rest together?

Rock even had a cord, so they could still cable up even with Blues' cord ruined. Their wireless link would be severed when Blues offlined, but with the cord, Rock would at least receive systems data and status updates from Blues.

Blues even got under the covers. Rock crawled up beside him, settling down under the blanket and squirming a bit before quieting. The cord was run between the two brothers, final reassurances were exchanged, and Blues closed his eyes.

Rock hugged him closer, trembling a bit as he felt his older brother go offline system by system. Rock knew that X couldn't feel the pain that Blues was in, couldn't feel the damage, and if X could…maybe it was better this way, he thought. Blues was _hurt_. On top of all those old pains, this.

Rock nestled down, and the only sound in the room was a child's whisper.

"Please be alright."

* * *

><p><em>And an ending note from us:<em>

_While it seemed that a few of you were expecting a bit more in terms of the fight with the Protocol, you have to take into consideration all that's transpired since Wily completed Zero back in 20XX. By the time he was activated in 21XX, he'd already begun overwriting the personality that Wily had installed, and shortly thereafter lost control of the virus to Sigma. By the Elf Wars, he'd jumped bodies, and he's woken in this era with a corrupted memory drive. Add in that he had absolutely no weaponry on hand in the lab, that he had no use of the virus, that Blues knows how to fight against mental attacks, that Shadow does outclass him in a lot of ways, and that Zero's not quite the harbinger of death that Wily wanted him to be, and really, the Protocol was outmatched._

_**Translations:**_

Vater würde in Sie enttäuscht sein, Shadow. Welche Art von bedauern-arsch ninja Seiten mit dem _Feind?_

_Father would be disappointed in you, Shadow. What kind of sorry-ass ninja sides with the enemy?_

Ich kann es mir nicht erlauben zu fallen! Ich können nicht scheitern mein Vater!

_I can not allow myself to fall! I can not fail my father!_


	24. Repairing the Pieces

_X takes the time to sit down and settle the Resistance, to answer their questions after this latest incident, and in turn, Shadow takes the time to answer some of X's questions. Here, the mystery of went on in 20XX begins to unfurl…_

* * *

><p>An hour after he left Zero's room to the second, Shadow looked in on his youngest brother. He didn't actually enter the room in a way Zero could sense, only slipped into the shadows to look around, made sure that Zero was at least calmer now.<p>

He wasn't expecting the room to be _trashed_.

Zero was curled up on the bed, tucked into the same corner, but this time, he was wrapped up in the sheet that had been covering the bed before. His armor was strewn about the room, gauntlets thrown towards the door, his boots tossed wherever he managed to throw them, and his helmet was resting on the floor in the opposite corner of the room, one cheek guard horribly mangled and dented.

The chair that had been in the room was in three separate pieces, the back and seat on the floor, the wheeled bottom part sticking out of what was left of the terminal in the room. While the keyboard was surprisingly intact, the desk itself was bent and dented where Zero had hit it, the bottom of the chair wedged impossibly far into the holo-screen's projector.

The second desk Zero had been using, the one he'd set up for weapon repairs, was _actually_ in pieces, and there was a drying red fluid staining some of the sharper edges.

How he'd managed to break a metal table was a question that would have to be answered another day.

The charger pod that had been standing against one wall was now on the floor, the cover removed from its track and laying beneath the overturned pod. Wires stuck out from the back of the main part of the pod, frayed and broken, and the wires that were jutting from the wall where the pod had formerly rested were still sparking.

There was a nice-sized pool of red fluid beneath the wiring.

Were it not for the sheet covering his body, Shadow would have been able to see the mess that was his little brother. His undersuit was torn in several spots, the only outward sign that Zero had been damaged since his auto-repairs had long since closed the tears in his synth-flesh. His hair, normally so neat despite its length, was a matted, tangled mess beneath the sheet, some of the glistening blonde strands stained by the coolant and other fluids his actions had spilled across the room.

Shadow made himself apparent then, stepping out from the shadows, making a point of looking around the room, taking in the damage. The bed was (somehow) mostly intact, even if the mattress would need to be cleaned of coolants and lubricants once Zero was done throwing fits like this.

He was doubly glad he'd removed the weapons from the room. This tantrum, this mess, was preferable to a unit self-destructing.

But he'd done all of this in an hour's time? Forte would be impressed.

"What's all this?" Shadow turned and looked at Zero then, his right eye closed as his left scanned the android, checking his status. As a fellow Wilybot, Zero had the distinct privilege of being able to be scanned by his brothers regardless of his mood. Doctor Wily built them to be able to sustain themselves, even without human support, after all.

Zero flinched a bit, drawing the sheet tighter around him, and he winced and hissed at the motion, his eyes shimmering with tears as he withdrew from Shadow. "N…n…nothing," he managed, whimpering as he grabbed at the sheet, trying to keep a barrier between him and Shadow. "I thought…I told you…go take care of them."

Shadow continued his scan, taking his sweet time to get a full status report and picking his way over stray hunks of furniture and broken technology as he approached Zero's bed. "You broke your saber hand? I confiscated your weapons so you wouldn't hurt yourself," Shadow frowned, still scanning, "And don't tell me that it's already healed; it did not heal properly." Did Zero feel like punishing himself would somehow make everything better? Counterproductive. Now Shadow was worried that there were issues in Zero's logic programming.

"You're not supposed…" Zero sniffled, using the sheet to rub at his eyes a moment, careful to use his right hand to do so, insistently refusing the system alerts to offline the sensory relays in his left hand. "You're not supposed to be here, brother. I asked you to look after them. They need you," to protect them from me.

Shadow stopped a few feet short of the bed and folded his arms, frowning beneath his mask, "And Break instructed me to look after _you_."

Not sentimental indeed. Well, Shadow really couldn't be surprised. After the third war, Doctor Wily began teleporting everywhere, even though it was proven unsafe for humans. His mental status was so deteriorated by the time Zero came about, he had a lot of trouble reading the Robot Masters accurately.

"Break…?" Zero looked up at that, and the sheet slipped a bit, revealing the matted nest of sort-of blonde hair. "I didn't mean to break it," Zero said, pulling the sheet tighter and curling his left arm so that the damaged hand was pulled against his body. "I screwed up most of the more delicate servos on…on my repair table. Some joke, huh?"

Shadow looked back to the repair table. Or its remnants, rather. It was in pieces, scattered on the floor. Shadow wondered if Zero had any neighbors nearby that were now solidly terrified after his tantrum. His red gaze flicked back to Zero, "So. Did it make you feel any better?"

Ebony eyes flickered towards the floor before closing. "No," Zero admitted. "I just…I don't _know_, nii-san. I know that it wasn't me in that lab, but…all…all the memories…seeing Father…hearing him. I know I'm me, but…" He sighed, wrapping the sheet tighter around him. "I'm so damn confused."

"If I recall, Break told you that Father was very sick when he began your project," Shadow began, stepping over part of the chair to sit down on the bed as well. "He liked to teleport. I've been told it's been made safe for human use, but it was _not_ safe then. It…affected the thought processes of any organic life form that passed through it, and the damage stacked over time. Using it once was…incredibly dangerous still, but he used it _dozens _of times each war. By the time your project was started…Father already had brain cancer. He lasted only a month or so after your physical structure was completed." And once Doctor Wily passed…well, that wasn't what they were discussing.

"It's…I'm just…I got all the memories back, nii-san. Everything from back then, from Father's time. All the databases, all the Robot Masters, it's all there. I remember the things Father told me he wanted done to each of Light's units. It's just really…it's upsetting because I don't have my 21XX memory files in full, and the majority of the ones I do are either me hanging out on my days off," which he had figured were days he'd been granted R&R by the Hunters, "or the fight I had with X, the fight when I'd actually gone off the deep end. Or the fight with Sigma…the first one, when I…when he got the virus from me."

"You need to keep in mind that you remember…your origin, but not who you grew to be. Father had his plans for all of us, and nothing quite turned out the way he wanted," not that Shadow was complaining. At least Zero was getting some peaceful memories back, even if they were terrible in between. Really, Rock was in a similar boat in a lot of ways, except he had a Master to look to for guidance, reassurance, and support. Androids didn't do that.

Zero tried to shift the sheet so that he'd be able to hold it with just his right hand, but he hissed again at the pain from his left as he tried to grab at the sheet, eventually just leaning his head down and biting the fabric. He snuggled down into the soft cloth, half-tempted to lean against his brother. "What happened to all the others?" Zero asked. "I…the databases listed all of the lines, even though there's a bunch already noted as destroyed. Where are the rest of our brothers?"

"Let me see your hand," Shadow finally said, tired of receiving messages about Zero's hand and how he was refusing to offline pain sensors or tend to it. As for where the others were…

That was not something that was open for discussion at the moment.

"It's _fine_," Zero whined, holding the sheet, even though it fell to his shoulders, fully exposing the mess that he'd made of his hair—even with more than half of the flaxen strands still hidden under the cloth—and he shifted a bit away from Shadow. "Don't worry about it."

Shadow's response was to hold his own hand out expectantly. "Your hand."

"You're just being bossy because you're older," Zero said, shrugging the sheet off enough to place his hand in Shadow's. There wasn't much left of the glove that had covered the hand, and the middle two fingers were bent in a way that, on a human, would have had them screaming in pain and begging for anesthetic. The motion also dropped the sheet from Zero's body, exposing the tears in his undersuit, including a long slash across his chest that was stained along the bottom side of the ripped fabric with a mix of internal fluids.

"Of course," Shadow said. And like a good (younger) unit, Zero listened. Shadow glanced over Zero's torn suit, taking in the coolant stains and the matted state of his hair. Had he been human, he'd be soaked in his own blood.

Had he been human, he'd also be dead.

Shadow's grip was deceptively strong. He didn't put a lot of pressure that Zero would detect, holding the hand in his left. He moved with his right hand, acting as though he only wanted to look.

Things like this were best done quickly.

Shadow didn't even warn Zero to turn his pain sensors off. He figured that if Zero wanted to feel pain from hurting himself, then he could feel pain from healing, too. He grabbed Zero's twisted fingers, the middle finger first, and expertly realigned it in one sharp motion.

Zero cried out as the finger realigned, whimpered as the pain sensors registered the motion and the realignment, and he noticed the alert the moment a new set of nanites were directed to the area to fine-tune the repair. "Ouch," he whined, a few tears falling from his eyes at the sensation.

Shadow moved to the second finger immediately, realigning it easily, his eye scanning the hand, his mind monitoring Zero's status updates. Good, his body was going to complete the repairs now that the parts were in place. "You should consider this before you beat another table in. It's better to channel your energy into something productive regardless of whether you're feeling joy or grief." Life was more fulfilling that way, less empty that way.

Zero drew his hand away quickly, shaking the limb a little before pulling the sheet right back into place. "I don't have a training simulator here, Shadow," Zero retorted. "I can't just go kick holographic ass until I feel better."

And that said nothing for the way the base was going to see him, the way they'd treat him now that they were aware of his darkest secret. "I don't know what's worse, not wanting to go out there because I don't want to face what I did, or making sure no one can come in here to pay me back for what I did to the Resistance."

"What do you mean, 'what I did'? You did nothing. Break showed me your maintenance logs," all of them, "and I saw what they said. _You_ rejected that protocol and made yourself into what you wanted to be. The Protocol is what did all of that today, and it will never be able to act again. After it was disabled, Break completed the corruption. It is irretrievable."

"Doesn't change the fact that what happened is in _my_ memory files. It doesn't make me not feel that…that sadistic glee that the Protocol felt when he…when…when he…what I was supposed to…to X, to Rock…to Break." Zero was fighting tears, trying not to break down again. "It doesn't change that _I remember_ all of that."

And the way Rock had looked, had sounded, when Shadow had given him to Blues.

Those memories weren't going to go away, especially not when he was so busy trying to get other memories _back_.

"I'm not going to tell you that what Father wanted wasn't terrible, but those were someone else's desires and not your own." Every one of the Wilybots was originally built to kill, to dominate, to destroy. Growing beyond that was the hard part, Shadow supposed. He didn't mention that Break was injured so badly that he had to actually _offline_ and that Rock was tucked in with him and, by the feel of it, still crying off and on. He'd need to check in on the child next.

"Was he…was he ever a good man?"Zero asked. "All I remember of Father is him telling me that…telling the Protocol what it was supposed to do." Even though those memories belonged to a different personality, the memories were still his all the same. "I…you know, all those memory files and yet I don't remember ever seeing you." Or a few of the others, mostly the younger Wily Numbers. "I met some of them, times when Father wasn't in the lab…" Zero looked to Shadow even as he pulled the sheet back over his head and tucked himself into the corner once more. "How come you never came to say hi?"

"I was the one of us that frequented your lab the most," Shadow said, frowning slightly, "but really, it was a safety concern: we were concerned that you might get loose, and if you saw me and what I can do…my abilities would have been a quick and effective escape point for the others." And a surprise wasn't a surprise if it was expected. "As for Father's personality _before_ his illness overtook him…the Second Numbers knew him then, though he was already a bit bent. Break is the only one of us that met him before…before he and Doctor Light had their falling out, so he would have the best idea, though that time isn't one Break likes discussing, so I never asked." You had to catch him in a _rare_ mood to even reference it and even then he'd clamp up pretty quickly.

"That ninja thing you do with the shadows must be pretty damned effective if I never noticed you," Zero said, tucking himself into a tight little ball on the bed. "And…about Break…the…the…reprogram attempt that I…that the Protocol made…" Obsidian orbs shook a little at the thought. "Father did that to Break before, didn't he? Tried to change him while keeping Break awake, consciously aware?" Zero shuddered a bit. "Is Break okay? I mean…you know…mentally?"

"He…did. That was shortly before I was activated," Though when Shadow took it upon himself to make sure Break wasn't caught during his lab raids, the Seconds grimly informed him of _why_ they were taking such care to keep Wily from him. They hadn't shared the memory with Shadow and he knew that even if he'd asked, they'd have insisted that, really, no, he did _not_ want this crawling around his processor. "Well, didn't try. He _did_ reprogram him while Break was still conscious," and Shadow's voice was a bit tight, tight with empathetic pain—that kind of torture was unimaginable—and with a slight discomfort for what they were talking about. "As for whether he's okay…he did not allow me full access after the attempt the Protocol made. I can't say for certain that…he's okay mentally, but I do know that the Protocol did not actually reach his coding."

Zero nodded, though he had started crying halfway through Shadow's explanation, and he sniffled a bit as he looked to the elder Wilybot. "I…I'm fairly certain that Break wouldn't want me anywhere close to him or Rock for a while, so…could you pass along the message that I'm sorry? I…I shouldn't have let my guard down just because Break was picking around in my head. The Protocol shouldn't have been able to take control, and had I just been…been…_paying_ _attention_, I…I might have been able…" Zero rubbed at his eyes. "I don't know how I'm ever going to make this up to them."

"I will," though judging from Blues' reaction to the entire incident, he was blaming _himself_ for not noticing the Protocol's awakening. Honestly, it _surprised_ him. While they were _linked_.

That was terrifying now that Shadow considered the implications.

"They're…resting now," more like Blues was offline and if not for his core, he'd be completely shut down, "but I will pass it along."

"Thank you," Zero said. "Father was a bastard," he added a moment later.

Shadow hummed in agreement. The man had an ideal once, was looking out for their best interests once. By the time the Third War rolled around, he'd begun to veer off his path. By the Sixth, the whole point was to kill.

"Part of me feels like I've spent too much time around the Lightbots. I'm desperately trying not to cuddle into you the way Rock was with Break," and that brought the thought of another of Light's creations to mind. "And would you mind telling X that I…I can't handle having guests right now? I'm…it keeps playing in my head what Father wanted me to do specifically to _him_ and I don't need to break something _else_ trying to get him out of the room." He flexed his left hand, nodding a bit when the status report flashed that his motor control for the fingers was back in the green.

"Ah, well, Break is Rock's Master and especially given Rock's condition…his systems know that there are parts missing, recognize that they are in a potentially dangerous situation here, so he's constantly reaching into Break's systems for advice and reassurance. He was socialized as a human child, so he is very heavily physically demonstrative," hence the cuddling and hugging and snuggling. "As for X, even if I do tell him, he will disregard your request. That'd be like Break asking him not to be concerned." It doesn't work that way.

Zero sighed. "Just let him know anyway. At least if he does decide to be an ass and pop through the door, I'll have a viable reason to yell at him, and that'll help keep my mind off the images that keep playing in my head." He looked to the ninja. "And what's the deal with your eye? You only have one open on the regular, though the other one…" Zero curled into himself a little. "I can see the other through…through the memory files. It didn't look damaged then."

"It's not damaged," and Shadow opened both eyes, "but my right eye is a feed. It's going to Break right now," and he closed the eye. "Father used it for spying, but it's only active when I open the eye." Otherwise, the feed went dead.

"Part of me wants to know why it's so bad to have that feed that you insist on looking like someone damaged the eye, but," and he shrugged, "it's probably none of my business."

Zero sighed before shifting a bit, opting to lay down on his bed, snuggling a bit into the pillow. "I'm going to…to take a nap. You should get back to Break and the rest of them. And I'm sure that they're going to need someone on the network if Break is resting, so…" Zero rolled over, turning his back to Shadow. "Arigatou, nii-san," he said softly before setting his systems to hibernate.

"Oyasumi," Shadow replied before stepping back into the darkest corner of the room and flickering from view.

* * *

><p>It had taken longer than X had figured on to get all the Resistance members back online, and longer still to convince them that the networks were safe to access again.<p>

That Cerveau was backing X's statement and broadcasting publicly across the communications network helped.

A little.

X sighed, getting to his feet and hovering behind a few of the security monitors, looking over the displays on their screens for a moment before, "Vigile, I need you to head out, grab a few people."

Vigile took a moment to answer, disconnecting from the monitoring chair before getting to her feet. "Who do you need?"

X rattled off a short list of names, "and be back in ten minutes if possible," he instructed. "I want to get this incident behind us as best I can, but next to no one trusts the networks at the minute and it's probably better to keep this off the net anyway."

"I'll be back shortly," she answered, darting for the door.

"Master X, what happened?" Fidare asked, spinning in his chair to look at the elf, even if his helmet obscured his vision.

"I'll get to that when everyone is here." X nodded, as though to himself, "and I don't want any of you broadcasting this along the network. My brother…Rock does not need to hear what happened." He'd have to repeat that when the others arrived, though he was more concerned about a few of the chatterbox monitors currently in the room.

It hadn't taken long for the people he'd asked for to start filtering into the room, Vigile returning to her seat and plugging back in as she and Hirondelle walked into the monitoring center, the door closing behind them.

X sighed. "First off, I want to make it evidently clear to every single person here that _not a word _of what is said in here is to end up on the net. Ever. Rock does not need to be made aware of what I am about to tell you, and I know Blues will be able to track down whatever unit decides to disobey me on this. Personal copies of this meeting can be traded with other units across local wireless, but the net, for this, is off-limits. And as for the networks, they are currently safe. There are two Robot Masters currently monitoring the activity, and the unit…the unit responsible for the attack has been…dealt with." There was an edge to X's words, as if the discussion was bothering him.

"Now, everyone here is familiar with Zero's place in our history, in the role he played during the Maverick and Elf Wars, because of the stories I told when I started looking into finding and reviving him. One thing I didn't touch on, the one thing I never wanted to discuss, was why Zero was immune and why he, out of the three of us that _were_ immune, was the one the cure was derived from."

That he had the rapt attention of every unit in the room unsettled him a bit. He wondered for a moment how Signas had dealt with this without flinching so many times during the Maverick Wars.

"Zero, unlike either Axl and I, wasn't…wasn't actually immune. He was resistant to the virus, could walk into an area saturated with it, and walk out relatively unscathed. The…the difference was that he would end up borderline Maverick because of the effects it had on him." X took a deep breath before realizing he needed to stop beating around the bush. "Zero was the original source of the virus."

There was an audible shock throughout the room.

"And given that we've not had a massive Maverick outbreak in the base in the time that Master Zero's been here, I'll assume that he is no longer acting as a carrier for the virus," Cerveau surmised, his voice coming out steadier than he expected. If Zero was the source of the virus, and if that…entity had been programmed into him in some fashion…just what has Zero's builder been intending?

X nodded. "He's no longer the source or a carrier because Zero's no longer in his original body. The problem, however, was that the transfer moved everything in his mind—all his programming—from his original body to the one he has now. Part of…" X huffed. "Part of that programming was something referred to as the Omega Protocol, which was what we derived Mother Elf's coding from. What we hadn't been able to decipher in the code, however, was the fact that it wasn't just a virus control mainframe. Blues translated the files, broke the Protocol coding wide open, and explained to us that, had Zero activated as his maker had _intended_, he would have let the virus seep across the planet, taken mental control of every mechanical unit, and then taken control of the entire planet." X stopped there, waiting for a reaction, though he turned to Cerveau, figuring the medic was the only one that still remembered how to use his vocal processor.

"The Mother Elf has _only_ the virus control portion of the Protocol, then," Cerveau said, pausing for X to nod before continuing. The rest of the room was dumbstruck, completely unable to formulate a response. Cerveau's own processor was spinning. "And you said that the unit responsible for this has been dealt with," which, Cerveau knew, was Zero taken over by the Protocol. "So a repeat of this incident is impossible." And that was the important part: it was safe now, right?

"Before this incident, Zero was made aware of what the Protocol was to him and the fact that it was still intact. It was also shown to us that Zero's personality…the Zero we know was not the personality matrix built into him. Zero developed his own personality, set his to _override_ the Omega personality tied into the Protocol. With that said, Zero…he knew the implications of damaging base programming, and he asked Blues to do it anyway. He asked Blues to corrupt the Omega Protocol beyond any chance of recovery or restoration." X fell silent, letting his words sink in for a moment before continuing. "While undergoing the procedure, and I'm not entirely sure how, but the Omega Protocol was activated. The Zero that launched the attack across the networks, that did what was done to the base, to all of you, was the Protocol responding to an attack against itself. Blues…" and X's voice cracked a little here, "Blues managed to shut the Protocol down, to fully corrupt it, but…Zero is not taking this well. From what little I can gather…he still has the memories, still knows what he did, and he's…he's broken off all contact outside of his room. That," and X looked to Cerveau once more, "it seems that he restored all of his 20XX memories. Everything from his construction phase, all of his original loaded memories and databases…I think they've _all_ restored."

X looked ready to break down.

Cerveau looked grim. To have recovered memories from his construction phase, from his time as a newbuilt, with a maniac like that as a maker? "So aside from his memories here in this base, all he has are memories of an absolutely insane builder?" Because, really, if Zero was really made for something so horrible…whoever made him was sick in the head. Cerveau was glad, for Zero's sake as well as their own, that the android was able to choose his own path and be who he wanted to be rather than what he was intended to be.

"And the few memories he's recovered from 21XX, yes, but those aren't much better, considering two major files he restored were both…were both while he was actively Maverick. One was actually during the process of him overriding the Omega personality, the second was a fight with me when he absorbed too much of the virus and was supposed to be brought in for examination. The only positive is that he's remembered a lot of his down time at base and the final battle against Omega, but for him to have pieces of who he is against the entirety of what he was _meant to be_?" X shook his head.

"But is it safe now?" Faucon asked. He still hadn't reconnected to the networks, as odd as it felt for it to be so quiet in his head.

X nodded again. "Zero, despite the fact that he's locked himself in his room and severed his connection, is very much himself now. He…he needs to time to adjust to everything, but he won't be…he's not going to be able to reactivate the Protocol, either consciously or unconsciously. Blues made absolutely sure of that."

"And Blues-sensei?" Rocinolle asked, hope burning beneath the worry in her eyes.

"Running maintenance," X said. "He and Zero were wired in when the Protocol activated and…it went after Blues. I think it was mentioned before that Robot Masters were not given the same protections against reprogramming as we have, and the Protocol…attempted to do just that. There's been no…no permanent damage, but Blues will need time to correct the issues that developed from that kind of attack." He moved over to Rocinolle, resting a hand near her shoulder. "He'll be fine," he assured with a smile. "They both will."

"They both need time, then," Cerveau said with a slight nod. Time to adjust, time to heal. Mental damage wasn't something that could be addressed on a repair table, after all. "Though, if Master Zero regained his memories from the period when he was built…does he have any memories of the Robot Masters? Or data on them?" That'd be _beyond_ useful, considering Blues and Rock's presence in the base, not to mention this new unit that Cerveau was not acknowledging publicly.

A shrug this time. "If he has, I really…I don't know at this point. I haven't been down to check on him since the incident, but if his…if his maker had a reason to build him that focused on the Robot Masters," and if the Protocol's comments about what Wily had wanted the unit to do to the Lightbots was any indication, "it would be a theoretical yes, but that's not something I'm going to be bringing up until Zero's adjusted to this. I may sit down with him after he's better, see if talking with him can't trigger more of the memories of our time to restore. Right now, he's…he's got a very skewed sense of who and what he is and isn't, so I'm not going to bring up that question until he's recovered. He's in too much shock from what he did while under the control of the Protocol."

"If I may ask," Dande said, looking from his terminal toward X, "why is it that Rock-kun can't be made aware of what's been said here?"

"I don't want him to know how bad the attack was," X said plainly. "Seeing what Rock's mental state is like, with him being reduced to newbuilt status and Blues as his superior officer? It would be far too devastating and I'm not going to let my brother have to deal with that on top of already being emotionally upset because of the links shared by Robot Masters. That aside, Blues wouldn't approve of it in the least, and the last thing we need is him more upset than he already is because of what happened today." And the fact that he did not like the Resistance as much as Rock seemed to.

"Is there anything we can do to help them?" Colbor asked.

"At the moment, no. Like Cerveau said, they need time more than anything. Let my brother run maintenance and give Zero his space, even though you wouldn't be able to bypass the lock on his door if you wanted to. He's using a modified Robot Master coding sequence that even Zero and Phantom have had a heck of a time breaking. When they're ready to talk, when they are out and about, and I would hazard that this applies more for Zero than Blues, then you can approach them, but…" X shook his head. "Right now, the best thing we can do is get back to our lives, get back on the networks, and keep on doing what we've been doing. We all have our assignments, and our personal projects," and a meaningful look was cast at Ciel and Milan at that, "so let's not let this upset the rest of us."

"You said two Robot Masters were managing the networks," Fidare noted. "If Blues is down for maintenance…"

"Blues doesn't offline for maintenance," X responded quickly, trying to cover the slip that had nearly blown Shadow's cover. "He's not as active as he is normally, but he and Rock are monitoring the net right now. Zero's disconnected, and as I've emphasized already, he's not going to repeat the attack from earlier, so there's nothing wrong with signing back on and getting back to our lives." X looked around the room. "Are there any other questions?"

Silence greeted him at that. "Alright. If there are any questions later, either from any of you or the units you pass this data on to, please ensure that the questions are routed to me off the network. I'll make sure that I have someone leave a datapad in my room, since I can interface with the tech, and I'll leave the door unlocked for anyone that needs to stop by. I may or may not be in the room, but the option is there, and I again request that you do not breathe a word of this online."

With quiet murmurs of assent, the gathered Resistance members nodded before heading for the door and back to work.

X reached out for Cerveau as the medic turned for the door. "I'll let you know about Zero's memory files as soon as I can, though I make no promises yet. I don't know just how much memory was restored, how many files, but you know the trigger for your logs." X blinked. "And make sure you and Ciel pull Zero's memory restoration logs off of your networked computers. We can't afford having my brother stumble across this. I don't mean to cause an inconvenience with your work, so I hope you understand."

"I'll keep all pertinent data off of the network and confine it to my personal storage devices," Cerveau assured X; he didn't want to upset Rock any more than X did. It'd add a bit of time with the research, but sometimes concessions had to be made.

"Thank you," X said. "I'm going to head down to Zero's room, see how he's doing now, so if you could make sure someone gets that datapad down to my room, I'd really appreciate it." X pressed a hand against a nearby comm terminal as he and Cerveau headed toward the lift. "Take care," and with that, X loaded onto the communications network.

* * *

><p>X sighed, reclining on the network for a moment, before moving through the digital jungle and toward the bank of access points on the sixth level of the base. It took a moment for him to realize that one of the access points was no longer functioning, growing worried when the recognition sunk it that it was Zero's terminal that was no longer broadcasting.<p>

And Shadow had mentioned that Zero had gone offline earlier.

'_Shadow, why can't I find the terminal access connection for Zero's room?_' he called over the link with the Wilybot.

'_Because Zero felt it necessary to offline his terminal by piercing it with a portion of his chair,_' Shadow replied, a feeling over the link like the Wilybot was shaking his head. '_I didn't inspect it, but he probably went in and ripped it up by hand, too._' One definite thing Zero did not want was contact with the outside world.

'_Wait, he what?_' That was not good. '_A portion of his…Shadow, how much of a warzone does his room look like?_' X realized that the lock program meant that Zero had no way out, no way to move past the little hole in the wall he'd been assigned to, and it worried him that he'd been in there for at least three hours by now. That, of course, meant that Zero had been checked up on by his older brother at least three times, but that knowledge didn't assuage any of X's worry.

And he'd rather walk into the room knowing what to expect.

'_The only piece of furniture that is still…usable is the bed and even then it's not in good condition. He ripped up everything else like a petulant newbuilt. He also…damaged himself during the rampage, though his auto-repair function has since taken care of the damage. He also requested that I tell you that he does not want you visiting him,_' and there was an audible shrug there, as though Shadow honestly didn't expect X to put up with any of Zero's drama. '_He's been hiding under his sheet every time I checked in,_' like a child, afraid of what was creeping under the bed.

X sighed over the link. '_What kind of damage are we talking about? And how in blazes is the bed the only thing left intact? Most of what was in his room was _solid metal_._' And he didn't have his saber on hand…

'_The furniture is not in a state that can be repaired. He _broke_ his saber hand on his repairs table—I had to realign two of his fingers manually—and honestly, it's impressive how well he totaled the room with no weaponry. I think he only left the bed intact so he could hide on it._' And didn't X tell Shadow to expect mayhem? What was he so surprised about?

'_Part of me wonders if it would have been better to leave the saber,_' X said calmly, though his voice wasn't hiding his exasperation. '_He's usually not self-destructive, usually finds a way to take his aggression out on something other than himself. That aside, I've never heard of him getting as bad as…_' He'd busted a _metal table_, for crying out loud! '_Did he say why he didn't want me to visit?_'

'_The exact message was that he 'cannot handle having guests right now', though when I first checked in on him, he screamed for me to leave. The Protocol…he's afraid that he'll lose himself to it again, afraid that it will creep up even though it's irretrievable. He…also regained his memories from my era. He is not coping well with them._'

'_I'm guessing that you and Zero both realize I can't, in good conscience, leave him alone in that room. I can't _not_ visit._' X looked for an exit point elsewhere on the sixth level, ejecting through the terminal in his own room. '_Will you go in there with me? Maybe…maybe having you there will help him some._' If it didn't, X wasn't sure what he was going to do.

He really didn't want to end up having to abandon Zero, especially not with the blonde having recovered memories that he was not coping with well, if the condition of his room was any indication.

'_I told him directly that expecting you to stay away is unrealistic,_' and inadvisable. '_I'll come with you. He may begin yelling, but, well, he can't touch you physically._' Shadow moved from where he was lurking in Blues and Rock's room into the shadows in Zero's, '_But try not to become angry with him, even if he does yell._'

X nodded, moving to the door next to his, reaching out to trigger the doorbell.

"Go away," Zero called out, his voice mildly muffled by the thick metal.

X reached out again, touching the door, but this time, he took a good, long look at the lock program.

…And groaned.

Shaking his head, he walked through the door and into the room. "Zero…"

"I know Shadow told you not to come!" Zero said, pulling the sheet around himself as he tucked back into the corner. "You're not supposed to be here!" he screamed. Didn't X understand that Zero couldn't handle his friend being in the room when he recalled so _crystal clear_ how said friend was supposed to have died? "Go!" he screamed, body shuddering a little as he pulled the sheet fully over him, refusing to look at the Cyber Elf.

Maybe if Zero ignored him long enough, X would get fed up and leave.

"And I told you that telling him to stay away wouldn't work," Shadow chastised as he materialized in the corner of the room with the remnants of Zero's terminal. He leaned against the wall—noting that Zero hadn't punched any of those in—and looked over the trembling lump of sheet that was his youngest brother.

"X, please, don't…don't do this to me. Not now."

"Do what, Zero? I'm not allowed to come check on my best friend?" The condition of his room was a lot worse than he'd thought, and he frowned as he moved to the charger pod…or what was left of it, anyway. He really hoped he'd be able to get Zero out of the room by the end of the week, if not sooner. The lack of a charger pod was going to have very serious implications of the android kept acting like he was.

"_You're not supposed to_ _be in here_," Zero said, the sheet shifting as he pulled the cloth tighter around himself. Hearing X didn't help to quiet his mind, but at least he wasn't looking into those iridescent green eyes…and seeing what he was supposed to have killed. "X, please…I…I don't remember that much…about what we had, what there was between us in 21XX, but…you're not being a friend by staying here," by making him have to fight the memories, the sound of Wily's voice ringing in his ears to kill the youngest creation of Light.

"And you're not doing anything remotely close to healthy by destroying your charger pod and acting like the Protocol's going to rear its head if you so much as acknowledge that we're trying to help," X retorted.

Zero was sorely tempted to move the sheet just so he could glare at the elf.

"At least I'm willing to stay here and listen," X offered, dropping into a hover over the remnants of the charger pod, and he tried to ignore the dried red stain on the floor next to him. "Maybe if you'd talk about it instead of acting like you're scared of the monster in your closet, it wouldn't be so bad."

The blonde actually growled a little, more in agitation than anything else, and fired back, "It's _skeletons_ in my closet and the monster _in my head_. Big difference." And then he fell silent again.

From the motion of the sheet, X figured Zero had turned away from him and leaned into the wall.

"Break already destroyed the monster in your head," Shadow reminded Zero, still leaning against the wall. "But X is right: this is something that needs to be spoken about, and Break requested that I field any queries that either of you have."

"There's nothing to talk about," Zero answered.

"Actually, yes there is," X shot back. "Why do you keep referring to my brother as 'Break'?"

"It's his name," Zero replied softly. "It's his Wilybot designation."

X actually fell silent at that. Blues had a designation as a _Wilybot_?

Shadow nodded slightly. "That's the first name Zero ever heard attributed to DLN-000, so he's been calling him that. It's a name he will answer to, provided it's coming from our family."

"And I'm guessing that there's more to it than just a secondary designation," X said. "Considering what was said earlier in the lab."

Zero seized up at the thought, shutting off the memory before it could start back into the loop he'd only just recently gotten to stop playing. "Don't, X," Zero said, his tone soft and shaky.

Shadow almost grimaced. Where to even _begin_? "That Protocol spoke too freely, but…Break Man was the name Doctor Wily gave him after he found DLN-000 and restored him to an operational state." Which, really, was a nice way of saying 'repaired and reprogrammed'.

"After he found out that Light tossed him like a failed experiment, switched out his failing solar core for that crystal thing, and forcibly overwrote a giant chunk of Light's original coding," Zero snapped, finally pulling the sheet off of his head to glare at Shadow. "You're not winning any points by dancing around the fucking situation."

X couldn't help but stare, though it was honestly for both what Zero had just said and the way the android _looked_.

"What are you talking about?" X asked. "Light never finished Blues, but throwing him out? Why would he kick Blues out?"

"Not kick out," Zero said, refusing to look anywhere in the elf's general vicinity. "I said threw out. Like a busted piece of tech. Like something he didn't want. Your father treated Break like garbage. The only reason Light isn't in the same pile as Father is because Light at least had the decency to shut him down _before_ reprogramming him." Zero shuddered, eyes widened, and he hid back in the sheet. "Father and I weren't so considerate."

Shadow looked to Zero sharply, "And I was dancing around it because this_ isn't_ something Break ever wanted the sordid details spelled out for," and now X was going to have more questions and, honestly, what could Shadow say? Continue telling him the truth, how twisted and cruel life had been to Blues? How, at every turn, he'd been treated like garbage when, in reality, mentally, he was _the most successful_ of the Robot Masters? He'd circumvented his own programming time and again.

That was something androids were able to do, but Robot Masters? That should have been _impossible_.

X didn't honestly know what to say. To know that he'd been mistaken about Blues, to think that he'd thought that it was just incomplete programming, that something had happened between him and their father? X shook a little as it hit what Blues had _really_ meant about what happened to the prototype of a project.

"Break doesn't like talking," Zero said from under the sheet. "Never did, from what I remember. The only way X is going to get half of what went on back then is for one of us to start talking." Zero wanted the android—and the Robot Master, for that matter—out of his room. "Or would you prefer I tell you what Father had planned for your family, since talking about Break is so frowned upon? Maybe give you an idea of _why_ I didn't want company?"

Shadow sighed, "Break wasn't…what was intended for the Robot Master projects. He was designed to create the solution sets that the rest of us would use. He was designed to be the top-tier problem solver for our _race_. I don't think any of the humans really understood what that meant, least of all Doctor Light. Break _frightened_ him. Break did not take orders well, did not tolerate anyone correcting his actions when…when his own solution sets showed that his method was most expedient. He did what he was supposed to, and did it well, but his demeanor was alarming to the humans he interacted with. They interpreted him as threatening. He…was already active for a while when the Three Laws were installed. He was already mentally an adult, already set in his ways, when they were imposed." And it was so much easier on the newbuilts to have it to begin with rather than growing up without it and suddenly being so constrained.

"And that says nothing at all about how poorly those Laws were coded in general," Zero said, shrugging.

"You're telling me that my father dropped the Laws on a unit that had been running already?" X was shocked, and honestly a little pissed at Light. "Who, in their right minds, saw Asimov's Three Laws as a means of correcting this supposed 'issue' with Blues? There are other ways to deal with units that are acting outside of their base programming," all ways that didn't involve touching a single line of their coding, relied heavily on getting the unit to sit down and discuss _why_ they felt they were in the right.

"Your father is the one that caged his own robots," Zero replied coldly. "Father spoke very negatively of Light's insistence that the Laws were the only way to make the units safe. It didn't help any when Break was able to avoid following some of the Laws because he'd found loopholes in the wording," just like all the books X had read while he was growing up and working with Doctor Cain.

"You're forgetting something here, X," Shadow said, his voice sounding a little tired. "You're looking at this from the viewpoint of not only an android, but as someone who's had a great deal of experience dealing with mechanical units. I know Break made _you_ scream more than once, and he was trying to be nice to you the entire time. Break was the first of the Robot Masters. He was the first sentient, sapient, self-aware machine_ ever built_. Light had _no idea_ what he was dealing with. He had _no idea_ how to approach Break, how to speak to him."

X looked to Shadow then, the words sinking in and leaving a very hollow, empty feeling in their wake. "He was _the_ first?" he said. "How…what was…how did Light develop the Robot Masters if there wasn't anything before them? No testing phase, no earlier models…" Everything X knew about programming and beta testing just got chunked out the window at that realization. "I thought Doctor Light was…well…a _doctor_. He had the degree, the knowledge, and yet you're trying to tell me that he let himself fly by the seat of his pants with something as…overwhelming as a human-level sentience program?"

"Break was…a bit of a surprise," Shadow said, clearly unsure how to answer X: he certainly couldn't speak for the late Doctor Light, and Shadow realized, at X's mention of human-level, that there was something else the android wasn't connecting, something that…was this really the time for _that_ can of worms?

"You really don't get what it means for him to be the first," Zero said, and even with the sheet covering him, X could tell he was hunched over, as if he wasn't really in the mood to be talking, as if he just wanted to find that one thing that would have X yell at him and storm out over. "They…our siblings, X, the ones that Light and Wily built or controlled…they weren't…" Beneath the cloth, Zero was pinching the bridge of his nose, trying to deal with this little tidbit of information himself. "X, the Robot Masters weren't built to have human-level sentience. They weren't supposed to be as…advanced as they were. Do you even realize that—"

"Zero," Shadow warned, the Robot Master's voice dropping dangerously low, his posture stiffening, his hands gripping into fists. "That's _enough_."

"Oh, so _I_ have to deal with knowing at least part of what was so fucked up about your era, but he gets to be blissfully unaware?" Zero had tossed the sheet off, exposing all of the damage he'd managed to do to himself as he got to his feet, glaring at Shadow. "You know exactly what was so damned wrong about that time and you're content to let me wallow in this cesspool of humanity's idiocy while sparing the baby Lightbot? How the hell is that _fair_, Shadow?"

Shadow shook his head, immensely irritated, "You sound just like Forte. You're carrying the memory of what happened to _someone else_ around and while I understand that all of this data is…sudden for you, it's still what was inflicted upon _us_. Respect our judgment and our wishes." And that came out sounding more like an order.

"The fuck if I do!" Zero shot back. "All Forte cared about was proving he was better than everyone else, decided he wanted to walk around toting his ego like he was something special. What I care about is everyone here not walking on eggshells around X because _his_ father didn't bother dropping decades' worth of bullshit on his processor before he was even allowed to walk around the lab. Hell, before he was even complete enough to walk!" Zero remembered too well the few times early on that Wily had woken him. "You're my brother! Why the hell do I have to suffer with this, with what I know was done to my family, to X's, _to Break_, while he gets to walk around blissfully unaware of how much humanity fucking sucks?"

Shadow closed his eye, rubbing his temple with one hand as Zero screamed at him like a newbuilt. Honestly, Zero was _just like Forte_. And there was only one way to communicate with units that wouldn't _listen_. Shadow moved in the blink of an eye, turning and kicking Zero square in the chest, sending the unit reeling back onto the bed. It was all Shadow could do to keep from screaming right back at Zero. "This _isn't about you, Zero_. This is about the two units in the room down the hall, about_ Break's privacy_." And he'd already been violated once today. "He's going to be fucked up enough as it is when he wakes, _do not make this worse_."

Zero only managed to hold the glare for a few seconds before Shadow's words sank in. _When he wakes…_

After what the Protocol did to him, Blues had gone _offline_?

With a choked whimper, Zero dove right back under the sheet, the lump on the bed shaking lightly, and the sobs started a moment later.

X was still, quiet, unable to fully comprehend what had just happened, still trying to mull over and process what Zero had managed to say before Shadow cut him off.

Part of him wanted to ask Shadow what was so bad that he'd told Zero to drop his line of thought.

The rest of him figured it was better off if he didn't know.

Shadow was rubbing his temples again, his patience seriously grated on as he moved Zero's status from an adult-level unit to more of an adolescent. Into the same classification as Forte. "_Either way_, I expect that Break will be down for at least twenty hours. His core needs to settle and his mind needs time to—to comes to terms with this." To come to terms with this happening _again_, in a place that should have been safe, even if it wasn't by someone that Break had every right to trust implicitly.

Truly, Doctor Light's violations had been the most debilitating.

Shadow couldn't bring himself to tell the androids that Break was seriously considering ordering Shadow and Rock to leave the base, leave Neo Arcadia, with him. He knew that the invitation would be open to X, but it wasn't one that X could realistically accept. And if Break did leave, X, Zero, and the Resistance as a whole wouldn't be hearing from _any_ of them again.

"Would Rock be okay with me stopping by, even after all this?" X asked. Blues was the type that could take care of himself well enough. Rock, however, would benefit greatly from someone providing him support, even if X wasn't really qualified to give the young Robot Master the comfort he really needed.

And with Shadow being from a different family, that wasn't going to work too well otherwise.

"You should drop by," Shadow agreed, nodding slightly. "Break fortified the lock on the door beyond the point Rock would be able to break, though I can still extract him from the room if need be. However…I do not think he will be willing to leave Break's side right now. Break is offline, so his wireless isn't up. Rock wired into him to still have a connection, but…" But Blues wasn't conscious right now. The child would be lonely.

_Offline?_ X wondered. At least that explained why he hadn't heard his eldest brother's 'voice' in the Harmony when he'd logged on, just the shaky trill of Rock's and the heavier thrum that he'd quickly associated with Shadow.

Hearing that, X noticed immediately just how different the two families were when it came to the way they sounded.

His worry amplified at the thought of Blues actually being offline as comparative to simply doing defragmentation and general maintenance. It had taken far too long for his brother to simply set aside ten hours. Now, here he was, the time he would be down doubled and all of his systems in _shutdown_ because of what had happened?

X wondered just how deeply the Protocol had managed to claw into Blues' mind.

"If you two are going to keep talking about what I did in that lab, can you go somewhere else?" Zero sobbed from under the covers.

X nodded, moving for the door. "Shadow, if you don't mind…"

Shadow nodded mutely, glancing back to Zero once more before withdrawing from the room.

'_Do you have access to the secured bit of the sec net that Blues set up?_' X asked as he moved through the hallway.

'_I do,_' Shadow replied, the Robot Master trailing along in X's shadow, completely unseen.

X moved to a nearby security terminal, touching the input port. '_I'll cloak my logon, but I need you to grab me. I still haven't figured out how to orient myself there,_' or if he even could, seeing as he didn't have the same skills as the Robot Masters.

When X logged on, Shadow scooped the Lightbot up, depositing him into the secured zone, his own contribution to the Harmony resonating more strongly alongside Rock's. The two didn't sound bad together, but they didn't click the way Blues and Rock did, didn't fit together the same way. '_I will be managing the networks while Proto Man remains offline,_' Shadow slid easily into calling Blues by his actual _default_ name. Both Blues and Break were nicknames Proto Man acquired over time.

'_I figured this would be the safest place to talk, seeing as I made a point of not addressing your presence at the base with the rest of the Resistance._' That there was a Wilybot (other than Zero) in the base was something X wanted to help lead the Reploids into being okay with, rather than dropping it on them like the rest of the information overload they'd been subjected to in recent days. '_How bad is Blues doing that he's in shutdown for maintenance? I thought the Protocol…Blues didn't _feel_ like he'd been affected that badly._' X wondered if the Robot Master had been hiding the damage to keep X from fretting like a stressed parent.

'_It…the Protocol's efforts very nearly broke through his defenses. His firewalls and encryptions were in shambles; he has to rebuild them completely now that they've been ripped up so,_' Shadow paused, frowning slightly in a low thrum on the network. '_He blocked me off from a great deal as well, though my connection allowed me to experience more than you would have been able to. I believe that this incident also brought up some painful memories._' Flashbacks, replaying endlessly in the back of Blues' mind, reminding him time and again why this sort of trust, this sort of faith, _does not pay_.

'_Along the lines of the reprogramming your father committed against him, or what our father did?_' That _either_ of the roboticists had reprogrammed an active, sentient unit at all sickened X to no end. '_I…I don't know what to say about all this. For him to have trusted me, to have stayed here, knowing what Zero's base programming was capable of…_' X sighed, '_I'm surprised that you haven't all left this base behind like another one of his bad memories. I just wish there was something I could do, could say, to help Blues…and Zero, for that matter. Neither of them are going to recover well from this,_' and Zero didn't have access to a charger now that he'd caged himself in the room and thrashed everything except his bed. '_I'm probably going to have to start trying to crack the encryption on Zero's door, now that I think about it, or have Phantom do it._'

'_That thing? I can crack it,_' Shadow said with a feeling like a nonchalant shrug, '_though for the time being, it may be better to let Zero have his space. He can't stay in there forever, but it's only been a few hours._'

Shadow let out something like a sigh, '_And yes, along those lines. I…wasn't there when my father did it, and I wasn't even on Father's drawing board the first time it happened to Proto Man, so I can't say what happened, exactly._' The only reason they knew about Doctor Light at all was because of Wily's ranting and the journal logs that the First Numbers pulled up on Doctor Light's computers. Of course, at the time, Doctor Light didn't see a single thing wrong with doing what he wanted with the young Robot Master. He didn't truly understand what he was doing until years later, when it was far too late to even begin to say he was sorry, that he regretted it. Far too late to even dream of regaining trust, of making up for it.

'_I know that I should be more worried about Blues, seeing what happened to him,_' and X berated himself for this question several times over before asking it, '_but Zero's…really _Zero_ now, isn't he? Who he wanted to be, rather than Wily's…whatever that Protocol was supposed to be to him?_'

Blues wasn't the type to give anything willingly to another unit, especially one that had done wrong by him, but he honestly hoped that Zero being free of the Omega Protocol would count for something for his brother. '_I'm still so confused that we missed something so dangerous in the Protocol. Even though we knew Zero used the virus, was a carrier rather than a victim…_' Another audible sigh, and X hugged himself. '_But…I am left to wonder; if you're here, despite me not knowing about you until what happened in the lab…are there others still alive?_' Family, both his and Zero's, still active somewhere. '_I probably shouldn't ask why everyone is so set on avoiding telling me what happened back then, but if there's more than just the two the city found, more than just Blues and Rock…_' X's voice held a small tremor of hope.

'_Zero is himself now,_' Shadow said simply. '_When Proto Man says he is going to do something, he does it._' His reasons for doing it may be completely sideways; he addressed the Protocol more for Shadow and X's sake than for Zero's, but he did it, even after the attack. '_If you are in doubt, consider this: had he been unable to corrupt the program, we would have had no choice but to kill Zero. He'd have been too dangerous to everyone in this base, to Rock, and to humanity as a whole,_' and the First Law would not have allowed Blues to let Zero continue on that way. '_And as for the others…those two are the only units that Neo Arcadia found but…_' and Shadow seriously hesitated here, '_There are more than…just myself._'

X nodded, passing a feeling of gratitude along their link. '_I'm glad to know that there were other survivors. I…would hope to meet them one day, but with the situation being what it is right now, it may be for the best for them to remain in hiding._' And the Resistance wouldn't take all that well to a wave of Robot Masters suddenly wandering onto their networks, even though they certainly benefited from network managers actually being online. '_In…a memory file that Blues provided me…a unit by the name of Gemini referenced the name Forte. You used the name in reference to Zero when he started that argument with you. Who…who was, or is, Forte to Zero, aside from brother?_'

'_Brother? Zero's been calling me that, too. Has Proto Man spoken to you about how our, ah, 'family structure' works? We use words like 'brother' and 'father' because that's the closest approximation we've been able to use without…without offending humans_.' They found the concept of Mastering to be unsettling, to say the least. '_Though Proto Man avoids using even those._'

'_He has, and I…I sort of get the idea, the concept that you work with, but the familial terms, the ones humans use, are more what I'm used to working with. Partially because of the way I was built, partially because of who I was built by, and partially because of the world I grew up in,_' after Cain had found his pod and activated him. '_I would use the terms that you use, the idea, but…I think like a human. I feel the attachments in much the same way,_' even if certain emotional attachments didn't actually work with their physiological and psychological structure, '_so I really hope it's not offensive that I use those terms._'

Shadow shook his head, '_It's not that it's offensive, it's just that…there are a lot of implications with words like those that we…that really don't apply to us. But you asked who Forte is. His designation was SWN-001. He was built while the Sixth War was going on. His purposed was to destroy Rock. Father used much of Rock's coding and design to create Forte—he's the same 'class' of Robot Master as Rock—but instead of wanting to kill Rock, he more…wanted to prove his superiority over everyone, especially over Rock. Because he was built as that type of unit, it made the others want to take him under their wing, so to speak, and Forte was obsessed with proving he was independent and strong. He had an ego, much the same way that Zero does._'

'_That sounds a lot like Zero,_' X admitted, smiling, '_though I'm certain they developed those egos for different reasons. Something tells me, though, that if Zero and Forte had ever had a chance to meet,_' with Zero as himself, not the Protocol, '_that they'd spend most of their time butting heads._'

Ugh. '_Forte butted heads with everyone he encountered. He constantly looks for a reason to fight, for a reason to prove himself,_' because it was ingrained in his programming. '_And, yes, the two of them are very much alike, regardless of how Zero feels about it._'

X laughed then, at the thought. '_Well, if things work out and he restores more of his 21XX memories, you'll see that there's a bit more to his personality than what you're seeing here. I think him not having that contextual link between then and now, even though he's got pieces, is really leaving him in limbo about his place and his purpose._' That the Protocol had taken hold, taken control, would have a long-lasting effect on the ex-Hunter, at least until his other memories restored in full.

X remained silent for a long moment, as if mulling over what one of the hundreds of questions he had he wanted to ask. Finally, '_I'm still in a bit of shock finding out about my brother, about…about Blues. I honestly thought that he was a Robot Master prototype, but not a sentience program prototype. Then to find out the man who built me,_' who X only had positive memories of, what few files were still intact, '_treated him as…treated him the way he did…_' The elf stopped, collecting himself. '_Part of me wonders if Blues was Light's doctorate project for the doctor to have acted as he did._'

'_Light already completed his doctorate, was well past it, by the time Proto Man was built and activated,_' and really, Shadow could understand X trying to rationalize what Light did to Blues. Not excuse him, not make it okay, but try to understand.

X frowned, and his concern and revulsion translated all too clearly across the link as a horrid thought crossed X's mind.

Shadow's nexus shifted, his focus turning to 'look' more fully at X as the android exuded anxiety and a generally upset feeling. '_What happened?_'

'_I just…_' X could have sworn he actually felt _ill_ at the thought, '_Things really did change a lot between your era and mine._'

Shadow sent a reassuring feeling to Rock now that the child sensed that something was amiss, and cloaked himself and X some, though not to such an extent that X's defense systems may think it a threat. '_Well, yes, things have, but what happened?_'

'_It just…between the way that Rock and Blues reacted to Ciel's question, the things that have been said, and what Zero said in the lab…what the Protocol said…_' X looked towards Shadow's nexus, strengthened the link between them as he felt himself collapse a little. '_They didn't see you as human, as people. Reploids are seen as a manufactured part of the human race, but then, back in your time?_' X actually hoped he'd just misread all the signs. '_Is that the reason your social structure is based on a master unit over subservient unit ideal, because you were more…more…seen as…as property instead of people?_'

X wanted to throw up.

Shadow didn't recoil from X, didn't become defensive, angry, or upset. His aura felt a tinge sad, but in a way that meant that he'd long ago accepted that as reality. That he accepted that humanity would _never_ accept them. That they'd be separate and unequal. '_I'm sorry that we couldn't find a…good way to tell you. Don't bring this up with Proto Man. Ever. But your assessment is accurate: we weren't seen as people at all. We were…not intended to be people, and that we were sentient was…kept hidden from the public for a very, very long time._' Humanity wanted _convenience_, wanted their lives to be easier. To have an infant race dumped into their collective lap?

No, toasters were much easier to deal with.

X sighed, fell back into the energy of the network, let himself drop into the flow as if he were floating along in a vast ocean. '_I…I don't honestly know what to say to that. I mean, sure, in the century in that diagnostic pod, I dealt with sub-citizen classifications and caste systems in scenarios meant to test my ethical programming, to see how my judgment protocols would react, but to hear that my own family, the ones built like my family, were treated as such?_' It was beyond sickening, beyond infuriating. '_In some ways, I'm glad that you survived, however many of you are left._' Blues had mentioned eighty along the main lines, and how many others were there beyond those? X had no idea. '_Maybe…when we take back the city…_'

And the gears were starting to turn. '_Blues mentioned that some of the Robot Masters weren't given humanoid bodies, weren't meant to look remotely close to something that humans could relate to. Do…do you think…for those that are left, wherever they're all hiding…_' and that hope was back in his voice, '_that they'd work with the engineers in Neo Arcadia to construct new bodies for themselves?_' X 'looked' at Shadow's nexus. '_Would you accept that offer, even though you already have a form that's closer to human?_'

And Shadow stared at X. Shadow himself _was_ fairly humanoid for a Robot Master. His armor gave him away, but his face? Fully articulate. And an offer like that? That kind of generosity? Shadow stared for several seconds longer, apparent even over the network, before finding his voice. He couldn't keep the amazement from it. '_You would…_' He trailed off for a moment. '_There are those among us that….undoubtedly would be mistaken for very large mechaniloids by the humans and Reploids of this generation,_' in case X needed an idea of just how robotic some Robot Masters were made to look. '_But looks aren't one of our main concerns. What we care about is doing our designated jobs and doing them_ well_. I think they may be receptive to an overhaul, provided it does not reduce that ability to do their job in the slightest. Even the tiniest loss will mean a complete refusal._' And X needed to understand that if he ever wanted to begin to understand the Robot Masters. He was open-minded, he wanted to learn. That was a good sign; no wonder Proto Man took such a liking to him.

'_Why would it change their designated abilities, their efficiency? I didn't say anything about touching their programming. I was talking about building new bodies for them, with each of the units overseeing the construction process. And it'd_ just _be the body, since it's a fairly easy process to move a processor from one body to another._' It wasn't like they hadn't done that with a few of the units they'd been able to rescue before the start of the Elf Wars. '_If it couldn't be done, if we don't have the materials, I can understand, but the offer will remain._' Every one of the surviving Robot Masters deserved that right, that chance. '_All I want to do is give you now what you were denied back then._'

'_A great deal of what we can do ties in with our physical construction. It's not the programming they'd be concerned about. I mean a net loss in basic physical capabilities,_' and Shadow wracked his mind for an example that X would have _seen_ before. '_Take Ice's abilities, for instance. You saw Rock's memory. If the new body did anything to make him less capable to exert himself in the environment like you saw, he'd have refused the offer._' Because compared to being able to fulfill your designation? Physical looks, vanity, were_ nothing_ in comparison, '_Though I do see the validity behind your point; they would have a better reception with more humanlike bodies,_' even if Shadow thought that such a small detail shouldn't matter.

Comprehension blossomed in X's signal. '_I think you're not seeing the full picture when I mention providing them new bodies. The Reploids you see here, in this base, are civilian-class, which means they're really low-spec. Units like my kids, the military units under them? They're…well, you'll see what I mean when we take the city back. I personally think that between the Robot Masters knowing how their construction affects and allows their abilities and the technicians being good at what they do,_' because, really, programming was their biggest issue. Construction, Reploid engineering? They were _geniuses _in that field. '_Either way, the offer stands. What comes of that in the future? It's all up to you._'

'_Thank you. I will bring it up for consideration; I am certain that there is more than one unit that will be intrigued by your offer._' Beyond certain.

X nodded over the link, though he kept silent about the comfort that Shadow's words had provided.

He'd managed to get the ninja to admit that the other units were alive and well. While Shadow's first admission had affirmed that there were survivors, something in his tone, in the way he'd mentioned that 'more than one unit' would be interested in his offer, told X volumes.

He honestly hoped he got to meet them all.

'_What of you?_' X asked after a moment. '_I'm certain you don't want to continue on indefinitely with this hiding in the shadows thing,_' even though he was extremely good at it. X couldn't really pin down how long Shadow had been there, though he guessed that the unit hadn't been too far behind Rock and Blues.

'_You want to let the Resistance know of my presence,_' Shadow surmised, glancing up through the shadows when Rock shifted. At least the child had calmed for the most part and was quiet.

'_I…eventually, yes,_' X admitted. '_While Cerveau and Phantom are already aware of your presence, you can tell from my son's reaction that your eye color will take a moment to adjust to. However, if you'd prefer to remain…an unknown, I'm sure I could handle that. Cerveau doesn't use the comm net as a gossip board and Phantom will keep the information to himself if so ordered._'

'_If you want them to know, then we may as well get it over with,_' and Shadow really didn't seem to care one way or another. '_I won't be going anywhere even if they find my presence here disagreeable,_' he added with a bit of a shrug over the network.

'_It's probably for the best to wait a day or two,_' X said. '_We've been dealing with…a lot of major changes around here, so to provide them a moment to catch a breather_'—he hoped—'_will make it a little less difficult to accept._' There were already a number of upsets that had occurred within the Resistance, so to allow a small adjustment period before throwing Shadow's presence at them was probably the wisest move X could make in that regard.

'_As you wish,_' Shadow said; it didn't matter to him either way. '_As I said before, I won't completely kill the link, so whenever you're ready._'


	25. Making Improvements

_We're very encouraged to see that people are enjoying this story enough to send corrections on the grammar for the German. We have someone registered that's provided translations, so just know that we know. I just have to upload the older chapters over again and put the edits in. She's going to provide the few lines that need to be gone over, so just know that this issue's already been addressed._

_And yes, angst and revelations abound! To all those concerned, Zero will snap out of it in a few chapters' time: this kind of brooding doesn't suit him, does it? Him just shrugging this all off with no emotional impact whatsoever wouldn't make for a believable character, though, especially considering the magnitude of what just happened. _

_As for where Ciel was, she wouldn't have gone running to Cerveau's lab or made an appearance for several reasons. The first and most obvious reason is that she'd have had two unconscious Reploids in her lab—Milan and Alouette—and she'd have been occupied with trying to get them up and figure out what was wrong. The second reason is that she didn't know that Zero and Blues even went to the lab for maintenance, so she had no idea where the source of the problem was. And as proactive a person as she can be, I'm sorry, but even if she had known what was going down, she'd have done nothing but gotten killed._

_Add in the reality that them going to the lab and the attack itself took all of _maybe_ five minutes, and that's being generous…yeah. There wouldn't have been time._

_Cerveau was the one that went down to her lab to be sure she was alright, but given that the focus of the story isn't on Ciel, she's not going to be getting as much face time as some of the other characters._

_Our heroes really dodged a bullet, though, in that Zero's current body doesn't have access to the Virus. There would have been a lot of shiny new Mavericks if that hadn't been the case._

* * *

><p>The following morning, Rock was still snuggled into Blues' side, having barely moved at all the entire time. His charge completed long ago, but he stayed connected to Blues, didn't remove the cord, because otherwise he wouldn't be able to feel him. Blues was hurt. His systems were evened out due to the power down, but his mind?<p>

His mental condition wouldn't improve at all, not until he came back online and dealt with this consciously.

Rock knew that even if he did fidget around, it wouldn't disturb the elder Robot Master, but he tried to hold still anyway, instead listening to their combined systems noises and occasional footfalls outside their door. Rock knew no one would be able to get in. The lock that Blues added? Maybe Rock would be able to tackle it once he recovered the rest of his memories.

It was hard not to be worried. Shadow did what he could, but Rock wanted Blues and Blues couldn't…he needed his rest. Rock understood that, understood that he had to be patient, but…it was almost cold on the network here, like this.

One thing X liked—in a way—about being a Cyber Elf was the fact that when he ejected from Cyberspace to rejoin the world of the living, he could do so wherever he wanted.

Today, he figured, would be a good time to start his day in his brothers' room. He really wanted to check on Rock.

Even in Cyberspace, the defense program remained active, so he was reaching for Rock and establishing their link even before he'd fully solidified.

Rock picked his head up slightly, turned a bit at the shimmering form coalescing, even smiling a bit as X materialized. Rock did his best not to move too much—if Blues' arm moved, it wouldn't be put back around Rock's back. "X," the child greeted quietly, his voice and feeling on the aura not nearly as bright as X was used to feeling.

X smiled softly, moving into a sitting position on the floor next to the bed, resting one hand against Rock's back. "Morning," X greeted, love and comfort passed along their link as he hugged his brother as best he could. "How are you feeling?"

Rock hesitated, even as he reached out through his link with X, greeting the android and letting him know that he was happy to see him, even if Rock wasn't so happy overall. "I'm okay," the child said, his head craned to look to X as he shifted slightly—oh so carefully—so he could look at the unit he was coming to recognize as his youngest brother more fully. The arm remained wrapped around Rock. "Blues told me to charge off him while he—" Rock looked away from X, a tremulous feeling over their link before continuing, "while he runs maintenance."

"That's all right," X said. "Although I'm sure you're done charging," and there was a soft smile, "I'm not going to ask you to leave." Not with Rock's Master currently so far gone that he was offline, not knowing that the cable running between then had nothing to do with either one's power core or charge levels. "I wanted to come see you, see how things were going with Blues' maintenance, and make sure you were okay."

Because, even if Rock didn't have the concept anymore, they were still _brothers_.

Rock nodded, still a bit withdrawn, but not at all because of X. X didn't make Rock unsure; it was this whole situation. Rock glanced back to Blues' prone form, both of them mostly concealed under the blankets, then looked back to X. "He…he really didn't feel good. He can't hear us this time," and Rock clutched Blues a bit tighter at the thought.

X smiled, nodding softly. "He'll be okay," he assured, though at the same time, X queried Rock for a full status update. While the young Robot Master looked okay, his resonance on the Harmony the day before and the way he sounded now made X just want to check, to verify that, really, this was just an emotional upset and Rock hadn't actually hurt anything else.

Then again, that was more of a concern that X had for Zero, especially given what the blonde had done the day before.

X idly hoped that Rock hadn't heard that.

Rock let X have the status update, a warm feeling originating from Rock's side of their connection: X was looking after Rock, too. Rock's systems were in the green, but he was very, very upset to have his Master hurt so, to have his Master offline, when he was still so young and, now, so frightened. "He's hurt," Rock said, his voice quiet and tremulous. His body was hurt and his mind was hurt.

"I know," X said, pushing more comfort along their link, "but he'll be okay. He just needs time." A stronger pulse of love from X, "And I'll stay here with you until he wakes up if you want me to."

Over their link, Rock reached for X again, like a child reaching to be picked up, and sent some happiness along the line. "Would it be okay?" Rock was a little worried; wasn't X a busy person? "They'll need you, what happened scared them too, didn't it?"

X nodded. "It did, but I talked with them yesterday. Once Cerveau woke everyone, I spoke with them. They're still a little shaken, but…" X moved a bit, coddling Rock even though he couldn't physically touch him, and X sighed. "They're not as young as you," X said. "They're…they've been through a lot, just like you, but they're older. They can handle things fairly well," and if the lack of comm chatter the day before was any indication, they were doing worlds better now then they'd been a week ago. "Besides, they may be my family because I feel a responsibility for them, but you're my brother, actual family to me. That's more important, especially with everything that happened." And X felt a bit guilty that he hadn't been able to do more for them, hadn't been able to provide better support during and after the incident in the lab.

X's guilt translated over the link and Rock reached out to him again, curious and a bit puzzled by the emotion. He understood the concept of family the way X explained it, or he thought he did, and he understood that family was a way of saying that these units, these _people_, are important to you. And X was important to Rock, so that's what made them family? Rock wasn't sure. But the feeling was the same regardless of the name attributed to it, or so Blues told Rock. Love was love and pain was pain regardless of what words were used. Rock wished Blues was awake to help him figure this part out, too. "You feel sad too…because of Blues? But you feel bad, and…why?" Why should X feel bad when he didn't do anything bad, when he didn't hurt anyone?

"I feel bad because I couldn't do more to protect them, especially Blues, from…from what happened. I've mentioned before that I can't do as much, can't interact with the world, as much as I'd like to be able to because I'm a Cyber Elf. I…I feel a sense of responsibility for the units here, even if they're not my subordinate units, even if I'm not, can't be, their Master like Blues is for you. To be…inefficient in protecting them…it can be bothersome." X smiled. "But I try, so it's not all bad. And I learned from it," X assured Rock. "Blues helped fix the problem, fixed what was wrong, so it won't happen again."

Rock shifted under the blanket, under Blues' arm, and reached out to touch X again, never failing to be fascinated by X's current state as a Cyber Elf. It was a tingly, vague feeling. "Blues and Shadow wouldn't…wouldn't tell me what happened, exactly," though Rock knew it had to do with someone doing something cruel to Zero and forcing Zero to do something cruel to Blues in turn. And now Blues was hurt, and Zero too, though in a different way. "Is it lonely not having a Master?" Blues was only offline and Rock still felt a bit alone, still felt a bit lonely.

X figured the further he kept from the topic of what had happened, the better it would be for everyone, and deftly avoided mentioning the incident. "It's…it's a bit different for me, for us, because we don't…don't need a Master in the same way. We have people that we listen to, like how the Resistance looks to me for guidance," though certain members did have an odd way of showing their respect, "so, in a way, I'm the Master for this group, but…we think, Reploids and androids, we think more like humans. We make our connections differently. But…it is a bit lonely," X admitted, "because I'm…I…" X wasn't sure how to word this. "Since I'm seen as sort of a Master in that I'm a commander, there are not a lot of people that see me as…approachable. They see me a…they see more of an ideal than a person sometimes, especially because I'm so old. It's…I think the phrase 'it's lonely at the top' fits."

Rock blinked, processing what X said, and a look like comprehension passed over his features, "Because you can't link, so they can't feel that you're really warm." And if they could feel that, then they wouldn't be intimidated by X. "Some of them are afraid of Blues, too, because they can't link," and they were missing half of who Blues was. "But Blues and I talk to you all the time," Rock frowned, "so it's not lonely anymore?" Or at least a little bit less lonely?

"No, it's not," X answered, smiling, pushing more love and constant reassurance through his link to Rock, fortifying and strengthening their bond. "And you and Blues being here helped a lot more because…" X blinked, looking down in embarrassment. "I know that when you first met me, I was really scary, that I upset you because I was angry, but the rest of the people here…they'd never seen me like that before. I'm usually quiet and really reserved, so I think that was part of what was wrong with their…impression of me. They had an idea, and after these past weeks…I think I kind of broke their understanding of me a bit." He reached for Rock's hair, forlornly wishing he could ruffle it. "Sometimes, people see someone they look up to as really different from them, as better, because they can't link, because they don't really know. For me to be like I've been, to see that I do actually feel a lot of the same things as them…it's making them see I'm not different, that I can be talked to, that I'm someone they can relate to instead of being someone to look up to."

Rock blinked again. The idea of the person in the position of 'Master' not being relatable was…that was such a _lonely_ thought and he reached out to X again, feeling the Cyber Elf reaching to him through the link , fortifying their bond, and it really was reassuring. "I've…maybe it's because of the link, but Blues was always…" always just Blues, nothing else. Even if he'd pushed the link the first time, pushed it to check Rock's coding, to check that Rock was _alright_.

X nodded. "You feel people differently because you feel deeper. We can interact wirelessly or wired with one another, but we can't really _feel_ the same way. Like this," and X pushed a feeling of protection, like a blanket wrapping around Rock, through their link. "We can't do that normally. We can't feel each other that way because we're not really…we weren't designed like that. I think…I think part of why I can is because I was built with you and Blues and the others in mind," and even then the way he did that, the way he manifested emotions and feelings, was exceedingly odd and X really wasn't sure he could put how he did it to words. "I don't know if the others would be able to feel and project the same way, but this, this is something special between your model types." They were empathetic, able to feel each other out, because they weren't meant to work the same way as humans. Androids, and Reploids by extension, were modeled after humans, and that meant that they weren't really able to get into one another's heads, meant that they were alienated from deep links, left only with cursory interactions and surface-level connections. Their emotional drives allowed for a greater range of human-type attachments, but the ability to link their minds and share that closeness? That was beyond their capabilities.

Rock frowned; he wouldn't like not being able to feel others. Rock's feeling toward X were alternating between affection and cuddling, like an anxious child wanting attention. Rock didn't remember Doctor Light at all, couldn't even begin to imagine what their maker was thinking when he was built, when X was built. "It frustrates Blues when people can't connect since he…he has a hard time giving surface interactions a chance." A hard time trusting, a hard time trying.

With his past, X really couldn't blame him. The fact that Blues had stayed at all, that he'd allowed for him and Rock to stay despite what Blues knew of humanity's reaction to them, said something. X was intrigued and part of him did want to find out exactly _why_ Blues would have ignored what he knew in order to stay, but that was a conversation for a much later point in time. "I can…I can understand," X admitted, though he really couldn't relate, "and I hope that he'll be willing to keep trying as time goes on. Even if it is inconvenient, I appreciate it that he's at least trying."

"Blues is a really nice person," Rock said, his eyes straying to the arm still wrapped around his middle. "I can see why…why a lot of people don't like him or are frightened of him, especially if all they know is how…how humans interact." And none of Blues' past. "He does things for the people he likes, but he's not…not so nice to people he doesn't like," like he wasn't nice to Copy Rock, "But he likes you a lot, X."

A smile, love pulsed across the link. "I would hope that you like me too," he said, teasing a little. "And I like you both a lot, appreciate you very much, and not just because you're family." Though, were X being brutally honest, that was a big part of it. "Despite how I acted before, I'm really glad that the two of you are here, three if you count Shadow, though he's not family to us." Not directly, anyhow. X nuzzled closer to Rock, resting his head just shy of it sinking through the bed.

Rock smiled, still probing at X, his fingers partly pushing through the Cyber Elf as he tested different pressure levels, "I like you a lot, too," though Rock was more pointing out Blues' feelings about X because it was so very, very rare for any unit to gain his approval so quickly. Rock liked _everyone_. Rock was in the business of making friends. Blues? Blues was in the business of filtering moles from Rock's friends list.

More assurance. X kept the link strong, kept providing the comfort he knew the young Robot Master needed. "When Blues wakes up later, do you want to go visit Alouette and her Jangyo again?" X had noticed that the Garm had been returned to Rocinolle's lab at some point, and Alouette had messaged X the night before, asking when 'Mister Rock' would be able to come and play again. A soft laugh flitted past his lips at the thought that, really, Alouette and Rock were a lot closer in AI age than the little Reploid seemed to think.

Rock was responding more strongly via the link than he was in person and it gave X a more comprehensive idea of how the little Robot Master was doing. "I'd like to see Alouette and her Jangyo again," Rock nodded, eyes brightening some at the prospect. Maybe he could show Alouette that Blues wasn't scary? Provided Blues was up for it. Maybe it'd be better if he just went with X again…

Rock didn't think that Blues would be too keen on crawling the base after this.

"She'll be happy to see you. She's been wanting to play, but Ciel's been really busy and no one else really…gets that she's not as mentally advanced as they are, so playtime doesn't…doesn't translate well." Really, those that did go to visit either did so to ask the Reploid for help with the Cyber Elves or to ensure that she wasn't underfeeding her pets. Ciel occasionally took time out of her schedule, but with current events, she'd been pushing herself really hard and not granting herself a lot of time to just idle about.

That Alouette's AI was equivalent to an eight-year-old human never seemed to click with any of them, and it didn't help that Ciel never really admitted to anyone that she didn't want to update Alouette's AI programming because she was the last thing Ciel had of her father.

Constructed in the wake of Ciel's mother passing, Alouette was, by all rights, her little sister.

X frowned a little at the thought that Ciel really needed to start setting some time aside to spend with the Reploid.

Rock's presence really would help Alouette. So, "How much longer until Blues wakes up?" X asked, hand moving in lazy circles over Rock's back.

Rock hesitated at that question, gaze dropping to the mattress, quietly, very quietly, the child's voice intoned, "9.876 hours left," and Rock wasn't sure if something else would queue up at that point or if Blues would wake.

X nodded. That'd set Blues to wake up somewhere in the early to middle afternoon, which would make it very likely that Alouette was either in her room or Ciel's lab. "Would you like me to let Alouette know you'll be by to visit later?"

Rock nodded, clearly still considering whether Blues would be likely to come. Though if they were afraid of him, he may not want to look at them. "Could you? I think it'd be fun to play again, and if she hasn't had any other kids to play with…" That was lonely. Blues played with Rock, set up a lot of fun games for him, but if the Reploids here weren't doing that for Alouette?

"Will you be okay with me leaving?" He looked at the cable running between Rock and Blues. "And do you want me to come right back?" X had other things to do, but to prioritize over family? Never in a million years, especially after the prior day's events.

"Is it okay if you come back?" Rock asked; he didn't want to keep X from doing what he needed to, "It's not boring for you to sit in here?" Had Rock not been so worried, being linked to an offline unit would have left him bored to tears. As it was, this link, this tiny trickle, was far, far more comfortable than no link at all.

"It's not boring at all," and he reassured Rock of that fact over their link. "I'll be back shortly, and we can play with your lock program again. You can show me how to get through them better, even though I'm really not as much of a hacker as some of the other units." With that, X leaned forward, pressed his forehead close to Rock's for a moment, then got to his feet. "See you in a couple minutes," X said, pressing his hand to the terminal's access port.

The link remained strong as X fractured into a data stream and loaded to the network.

Rock tilted his head toward X's when their foreheads touched, eyes closing as Rock's feeling from the link was a warm, fuzzy, affectionate feeling. Bright and young.

Several moments after X loaded into the network, a strange sound echoed in the Harmony, like a fourth song suddenly manifesting as Rock looked up, eyes becoming round and smile widening, almost getting up from where he was to greet this newcomer. But Rock didn't need to get up, their newly-reopened link said affectionately, he's come to Rock.

It was good to see that he and Blues alike were alive and whole, the hand on Rock's head said, even if Blues wasn't as whole as he should be. But Rock shouldn't worry, it was okay now. He'd take care of it.

X had just sent a message off to Alouette's signal code, since she was offline at the moment, and was about to eject from the net when a sudden sound caught his attention. Shadow's song on the Harmony remained low but constant, while Rock's had suddenly brightened, as if in response to the new voice on their network.

A moment later, X's eyes went wide, recognizing the song from Rock's memory file. Reaching across the network once his defense system had pinpointed the nexus, X tried to establish a link to this new unit, calling out, '_Elec—_'

And the net went _dead_.

* * *

><p>And not just the net. The entire base was offline, power completely cut. Elec accessed the networks here, barely acknowledging Shadow as he quickly found the controls he was looking for and offlined the power through most of the base, immediately grabbing the coding for the power structure, output, and production and settling down with it leisurely, as though reading the Sunday paper. He needed to know what was going on here to be able to help fix it, and guessing never got anyone anywhere.<p>

Elec knew that Blues had been harmed somehow, but what happened to _Rock_? The second their connection flared back to life, he recognized Rock as a newbuilt and, pushing further, probing at the other Robot Master confirmed it. Rock's activation time was sufficient for him to be past that stage three times over. He knew that there'd been some damage from the time spent offline, but this kind of magnitude? Elec fired a status update request to Rock, quickly accepting it and reading it over. And he grimaced. He knew he couldn't be mad at Blues; the message he'd sent was choppy enough as it was and, judging by his condition, there really hadn't been the opportunity to compile a detailed report. It'd taken a lot to even send what he did.

That's why he was sanctioning Blues to go into a full defragmentation and maintenance cycle, overriding any warnings and concerns; it was _safe_ here now and Rock would be looked after. Blues needed this. There shouldn't be any question of 'should I' involved here. So Elec wired into Blues, using the port on the other side of his neck, and rooted around for a moment before being authorized deeper access and finding what he was looking for.

_Commence full defragmentation cycle Y/N?_

_Y._

_Commence full cleanup cycle Y/N?_

_Y._

_Full defragmentation and cleanup cycles commenced. Estimated time until completion: 244.153 hours._

Elec balked at that, a wave of irritation passing through him. What was Blues _thinking_, allowing himself to fall so far behind in basic maintenance?

Normally, Elec would have taken the time to greet X, take the time to _meet him_ first, but the objective right now was getting Blues into good condition. Their eldest 'brother' did absolutely nothing beyond what he needed to keep running (and barely) and it was no way to live. So, yes, Blues would swallow his medicine, bitter as it may be. X may have objected to that, which was why he was caught on the network and not in here with him and Rock. Elec knew Rock wouldn't object; it helped Blues and, really, with Rock as a newbuilt right now, he had absolutely _no right_ to claim to know better than Elec right now.

Rock was always better mannered than that: it was good to see that that hadn't changed. "Come here, Rock," Elec said softly, reached down for the child and disconnecting him from Blues. Rock was reluctant to do so, but Elec reassured him, showed Rock what the extended maintenance would do for Blues, how this would help him. And right now, Rock could help Blues by being a good child and being _happy_ even if his Master was offline. He'd had several hours to settle down and recharge: it was time to rejoin the living.

* * *

><p>X froze where he was. While the net had gone shockingly quiet, the elf knew that the system was merely idling. The power had been <em>cut<em>, which was why he was now the only unit online.

And he didn't have a way out until the power was restored.

What in blazes was Elec _thinking_? Or doing, for that matter?

Faucon shook his head, moving for the room where the majority of the security team was stationed. "Hey, everyone armed and upstairs. Turrets are still offline," and with the power off, they weren't going to be working anyway, "so we need to get topside _now_." The officer was thankful that most of the security team was either equipped with night vision capabilities or knew the base like the backs of their hands. Getting out for a timely response would have been _impossible_ otherwise. And that said nothing of the fact that the doors that were closed before the outage would have to be forced open manually.

The monitoring team was at high alert the second the power went out, a couple of the units wiring their charger ports into their terminals and trying to kick the systems back online. Shock ran through them as the systems refused to boot.

"Door's offline too," Sentinella called from the doorway. "Someone want to help me force this thing open? We need to get someone topside."

Milan moved Ciel to the furthest spot in her room from the door. "Stay here. I'm going to see if I can get in contact with the security team and see what's going on." With that, he forced the door open and moved out into the hallway beyond.

Ciel nodded in the darkness, cuddling Alouette in her arms, the young Reploid shaking a bit, though she was doing a good job of keeping herself from crying.

"I'm scared, Sis," Alouette said as she leaned into Ciel's shoulder.

"Milan will take care of us," Ciel said. "We'll be alright."

Alouette nodded. "How come stuff keeps happening to us? It wasn't all silly like this before Mister Zero and Mister Blues showed up."

Ciel laughed a bit, cuddling the Reploid closer to her. "Maybe it's a sign that things are starting to go in the right direction for us," she said. "Besides, it's a lot better than the boring stuff we were doing before, isn't it?" She really hoped she was cheering her sister up.

Alouette frowned a bit, hugging her doll a bit tighter. "At least boring didn't mean the lights went off."

* * *

><p>Elec let Rock settle on the newly-placed couch beside him, let the child lean into his side as he began analyzing the coding he collected, line by line, command by command, trying to get an idea of what they were aiming to do with it.<p>

Because what they were actually accomplishing was honestly…had_ humans_ coded this? At least the programming language used was (somewhat) viable.

It took all of twenty minutes for Rock to become fidgety and anxious: the power being cut meant that the network used by the Reploids was offline, which in turn meant that X and Rock's connection had been severed. Rock didn't like that, even if he really, really, _really_ liked that Elec was here.

'_Patience,_' Elec murmured over their link, '_this is for everyone's benefit._'

Either way, it was hard for Rock to sit still, and he'd taken to bouncing a bit in his seat on the couch, intently watching Elec work over their link, intently watching the power structure in this base reform into something good, something genuinely manageable. Increased productivity, increased output, increased efficiency across the board.

After two hours' time, Elec was finally satisfied enough with the coding side of the issue to permit power to flow through the base once again, the lights flickering on and the network pulsing back to life as though nothing happened.

Well, that was the point, Elec mused. The outage was inconvenient, surely, but the point was that they'd be able to get back to their lives and have an easier and more productive time of it.

Faucon and Milan both noticed the minute the networks came back online, moving out of the line of sight of the turrets as they auto-connected to the communications and security nets.

"Well, that's a relief," Faucon said, double-checking the area surrounding the base to verify that there weren't any attacking Neo Arcadians. Two hours with the base absolutely unprotected had been two hours too many. "Head back downstairs, check on Ciel. I'll have the rest of the team check on everyone else."

Milan nodded, ushering Fidare towards the nearest entrance. "Get down to the monitors, make sure the team's wired back in and online." Opening a message window, Milan quickly bounced a priority alert to Rocinolle: they _really_ needed those turrets back online and their transponders recognized.

Alouette jumped a little when the lights flickered back on, but she was smiling by the time Ciel's room was fully illuminated. "Yay, the power's back!" Despite her young age, she was quick to jump on the network, wanting to see if anyone else was online yet to make sure they were all okay. She made a soft sound of surprise when a message alert popped up, and she was out of Ciel's lap and dancing in happy circles. "Sis, Mister X says Mister Rock wants to come play and see my fishies!"

"Do you want to head to your room now and get it cleaned up a little before he shows up?" Ciel asked.

Alouette frowned. "My room isn't messy."

Ciel shook her head. "I picked you up this morning and saw it. It's messy. Go straighten up or I'll tell Milan to message X and let him know that you can't have company."

The Reploid blinked, then darted out of the room and down the hall.

X sighed as he felt the network wake up around him, and the minute Blues' terminal came online, he linked to it in order to eject from the network, sending out connection requests to Rock, Shadow, and Elec.

The first thing X saw when he came off the net, however, wasn't Rock and Elec sitting on the couch across from the terminal.

It was the white couch they were sitting on.

"When did Blues get a couch?" he asked.

Rock blinked innocently up to X while Elec merely shrugged.

X looked between the two, at a loss for words for a long while, and finally sighed, his shoulders drooping. He verified the connections with the three active Robot Masters, looked at Blues, and then realized that Rock had disconnected. "Is everything okay?"

"Elec's here!" Rock chirped, more to communicate how _happy _he was that Elec was with them than to tell X that he was.

"Well, aside from Blues being comatose?" Elec asked, frowning at the bed. "He'll be out for a while. I came to help out. And to look after Rock." Which, Elec was certain, this entire Resistance would thank him for should they ever experience a young unit romping around unhindered.

"Comatose? How long is he going to be out for?" According to what Rock had told him, shouldn't he be down for only seven or so hours more? That really shouldn't equal 'comatose' for the Robot Masters, in his opinion. "Although I am happy to see you," X said, bowing. "As well as meet you," although X hesitated to send a status query to his brother.

"I'm happy to meet you, too," Elec smiled, querying X on his own, querying for X's status and overall well-being. Elec knew about the form X took before he even came, but to see it in person? There had to be something they could do. "And Blues…" Elec sighed, a frustrated sound. "He'll be down for another 242 hours and some change."

X looked as if someone had just belted him in the gut. "He's going to be down for…" The elf _really_ had to hold back the urge to scream—not at anyone in particular, but rather at the situation as a whole—and opted to change the topic of conversation altogether. "Just out of curiosity, was there any particular reason _why_ you felt it necessary to shut off the base's power grid and leave me stuck on the communications network for the past two hours?" He sent his status update to Elec, attaching his own query with the transmission, as he dropped into a low hover.

Elec frowned at X, as though he'd just asked something really obvious, such as why the sky was blue. "Why did I…" Rock blinked at X, head tilted, clearly puzzled by X's question as well. Elec sent X his own status before attempting to explain this, even though Elec clearly felt this should be fairly obvious. "Have you even _looked_ at the setup here, with this base's power?"

"You're talking about the coding on the solar cells?" X asked. "You had to shut the base down for that?" While he was sure that Elec had spent the past two hours rolling his eyes and groaning at the coding, he still couldn't get why the system had to be offlined for that.

"The solar cells? What about the main grid, the generators? I'm fairly certain that they need to be cracked open and looked at—something's _not_ right there. Not to mention how _wasteful_ the system is: you have a lot of energy just escaping when your units could be charging with it, or using it to warm the base, or _something_ useful. The overall output is about thirty percent below what it could be doing with the resources you have, and that's not even considering upgrading or expanding." Elec seemed to catch himself there, clamping his mouth shut as he collected himself.

X sighed, resting his hand against his forehead, rubbing at the crystal on his helmet. "The more I hear the Robot Masters talk, the more I realize how much we've done wrong in the last two centuries." Although he did appreciate the fact that Elec was willing to work with the system, was seemingly willing to help. "And I know that we've got issues with coding. I…I tried explaining this to Blues, but I don't know if he got the message to you or not," especially since it seemed like Blues had been working below the radar in contacting the other Robot Masters. "Whatever happened between being sealed by Doctor Light and being reactivated a century later, general coding skills just…weren't as good as what you're used to. I don't know why, but…" X fell quiet, burying his face in his hands. "What do you need to do or have to finalize the repairs and upgrades?"

"Much of the knowledge was lost," Elec responded, though that didn't stop him from becoming exasperated with it, sickened by the whole situation. "Blue did communicate that, though in no great detail," because it was not needed. "I'm sorry. I didn't meant to insult you," and Elec was genuinely sorry, even if his personality was programmed to make him a bit arrogant, "but…as for the supplies, I'd need to look at the physical components first. Everything I listed is very fixable, very attainable," Elec reassured X, reinforcing their link some, though he was hanging back, more reserved the way Blues was.

"I'm not…it wasn't insulting," X said. "I'm just frustrated with this situation, with the fact that we've had such an issue because our skills aren't where they were in your time. It's like cleaning the house before having company, only for said company to start running white gloves across the countertops and showing me just how much I missed." It irked X's nerves that there was really _that much_ wrong with the system. "As for parts, just compile a list. I'll talk to one of our techs, see who'll tag along to assist, so that you can look over everything." Even though he trusted that Elec wouldn't do anything harmful to the components.

And that was going to require introducing Elec to the rest of the base.

X couldn't help but rub at the crystal again.

Elec had to remember that X was looking at this from a human's point of view: to find _any_ dirt on a white glove in _Roll's_ house? But of course, a human wasn't a Robot Master, and neither was an android. They weren't wired to be so anal about things. "I'll get the list to you as soon as I am able," Elec nodded as Rock smiled up at X and Elec alike.

X's posture read as stressed and frustrated, and X did his best to keep the units he was linked to from recognizing how badly he was beating himself up over the situation. He hadn't been the one that coded their power system, but to know that those around him had done so badly? He felt as if he'd somehow managed to fail them all, even though they'd survived this long. "Thank you," X said.

Rock reached out through his link with X, sending out feelings of affection and reassurance to him. '_Elec is…he's very self-confident,_' he had to be when he was managing such potentially dangerous plants, '_and he comes off like…like that. He wasn't completely disappointed in the power systems here, though. I think he's cranky because of Blues,_' and Rock frowned at that.

'_Still,_' X countered, '_it shouldn't have been bad at all. Systems coding isn't _nearly_ as involved as Reploid coding. Even the mechaniloids are more complex._' And X didn't even want to think about what Elec was going to say when he finally got a chance to look at the data for the Neo Arcadian power plant. '_But thank you for letting me know, Rock. It does help a little._' He looked at Blues, the ghost of a smile on his face. '_I think anyone would be cranky about Blues, all thing considered._'

Elec was looking at Blues again, scanning him, unable to link more deeply when a cord didn't connect them. "He looks like hell. Rock, did you get a full status report from him?"

"I got part of one," X said, setting up the file transfer and noticing, for the first time, that the report file was considerably large for it to have been only for Blues' shoulder joint. When he actually opened the file after starting the transfer, his eyes went wide. "Or I got a full one and didn't realize it until now."

Part of X was glad he was a Cyber Elf. It seemed like dealing with Blues, had he a body, would have kept him in a permanent state of 'I'm going to be sick'.

Elec accepted the transfer, opened the file, and closed his eyes, grimacing. "He's worse off than I thought," both physically and mentally. "In all honesty, I'm amazed he gave a full report at all. He almost never gives them to even _Rock_." So to have given it to X? Elec was impressed.

But still, all those parts, worn through, showing orange and red? Ready to break, ready to rupture. The pain. It seemed their centuries-long sleep did nothing to change Blues.

"I don't think he was thinking too clearly," X admitted. After all the damage he'd taken against the Protocol? It was a miracle he'd been able to stay awake long enough to get into bed.

Elec agreed. "This works to our favor, though. This? We need this. This will help up help him. I authorized a full defragmentation and cleanup cycle on his systems, so that's why he'll be down for so long." And in all honesty, Blues would never have done this for himself, especially not with Rock here as he was. "Though part of the conditions for that was that someone be here that could look after Rock properly, which wasn't a problem." Elec could do it quite easily.

X nodded. He was beyond thankful that there was someone who could be there for Rock. He was sorely under qualified and underequipped to handle the Robot Master. And Shadow? The Wilybot was impressive in his capabilities, but beyond that? Rock really did need family there, even if Shadow was a great bodyguard.

Reaching out and fortifying his link with the Wilybot, X sent a status query request for both Shadow and Zero.

Shadow's immediate response to X's query was a sigh. He'd been checking in on Zero hourly, and '_He's still huddled on his bed. He hasn't moved for the last…five hours, as far as I can tell. Not even when Elec arrived and cut the power._' It was honestly pathetic, and not in an adorable kitten kind of way. Shadow preferred frogs anyway.

'_He hasn't tried to break anything else, has he?_' Not that there was much left to break in the first place, but the pod had managed to only lose its lid and its connection to the wall. And the bed had been in one piece the last X knew.

'_No, he hasn't. He's been ruminating for the most part. I'm concerned that he will draw this out…_' Shadow frowned, considering Zero from his position on the ceiling. If Zero insisted on wallowing beyond a healthy grieving period…well, they'd jump that hurdle when they came to it.

Well, at least he seemed to have gotten the destructive phase over and done with in one fell swoop. '_I'm going to be letting the Resistance know about Elec. And you,_' if Shadow didn't voice a complaint.

'_That's fine,_' though it might seem strange for a ninja to be so nonchalant about being revealed, in Shadow's case, it honestly didn't matter. '_Although, shall I wait to appear before them, given that my eyes may alarm them?_'

'_Probably for the best,_' X said. '_That'll at least give me a chance to…get past the Maverick concern that may be raised._' X got to his feet. "Would you and Rock mind joining me? I'd…I'd like to introduce you to the Resistance. From there, it shouldn't be too hard to get you over to the generators and the rest of the power grid."

Elec rose, but Rock reached up to him, tugged on part of his armor, and Elec looked down to the child, blinking for a moment before reaching down and picking him up, balancing him on one hip in much the same way Blues did that day when X first met Rock. "That would probably be for the best," Elec agreed, still looking down to Rock, slightly bemused. Well, he _was_ a newbuilt, but to be so huggy? It wasn't disagreeable or unpleasant, just…unexpected.

"I just hope that you can get the lock undone, otherwise we're going to need Shadow to get us out of here." X looked to Elec expectantly.

"The lock? Oh," Elec said when he realized that X meant the game on the door. Well, now that he was looking at it, it would have been a game had it not…oh, wow, it really was a lock. That was _just like Blues_. Elec engaged in a staring contest with the door, frowning slightly at it, and after twenty seconds or so, he stepped forward and the door slid open. "I'm going to lock it again behind us, otherwise…well, he'll force himself awake if his systems don't register him as sufficiently secure, and that's almost worse than not defragging at all."

"That's fine," X said, falling in step behind Elec. "You seem to be okay with the locking mechanism, so it won't be much of a problem getting in and out." Even less so for X. "I'm just trying to figure where would be best to go now. Cerveau's lab on the fourth level or Rocinolle's on the fifth have the most space, but the power station for the base is on the second." He looked to Elec. "Any preference?"

Elec glanced back to X, speaking to him over his shoulder, "You're more acquainted with the size of the Resistance and how many individuals would need to be present for this. If a bigger room is better, we can use that first and I'll take a look at the power station after."

X shrugged a bit, floating along as he moved to Elec's side. "At this point, most everyone will find out over the comm net, even if I only have a few people in the room." Plus there would be the units they ran into on the way. "If you'd like, we could probably go up to Ciel's room. She's my co-commander with the Resistance and may actually…well, her research would prove interesting to you." X's voice lowered as they moved for the lift. "Though I'm not sure. She's been a little…hesitant around Rock and Blues for a while. I'm not sure how she'd react to you at this point."

"Hesitant? I guess I can kind of understand Blues, but around _Rock_? She's the only human here, right? She's not afraid of Reploids, is she?" Because that'd be _strange_ if she was. Not that Elec hadn't met his fair share of frightened humans, even if, really, he didn't think he looked that imposing. He pushed out over the networks, settling more, especially on the comm and utilities networks, checking through data and reading files and getting a feel for the base as a whole, even as Rock bobbled after him on the network.

"She…brought up a bit of a touchy subject during a Q&A session that had Rock and Blues both a bit upset. I think because she's used to seeing Rock with Blues, she kind of batches her reaction regardless of which unit she runs into. She's been keeping to her room a lot more since that day. Aside from that, no, she's not really afraid of Reploids. Kind of hard to be when she's an engineer, though she has branched out a bit in terms of her focus since she left Neo Arcadia."

"A touchy—_oh_." Rock rested his head against Elec's shoulder and told him the question that Ciel asked. Elec frowned; he could completely understand Blues and Rock's reaction, even if the girl didn't know any better. Of all the subjects to touch upon…Elec didn't let his own discomfort with the subject translate into his feeling on the network, instead focusing forward, on where they were walking. "If it'd upset her to have us in her quarters, then we should go to a more public area," though it was up to X in the end.

"Rock," X said, resting a hand close to his brother's shoulder, "do you know how to log onto the network with a mock account?"

Rock turned his head to look at X, his cheek still resting against Elec's shoulder as the child nodded slowly, "I watched Blues do it."

X smiled. "Could you log on and contact Alouette? I know she's looking forward to seeing you today, but I need her to run ahead and let Ciel know she's going to have company." Honestly, the girl needed to get over her hesitation. If there were more Robot Masters out there, other survivors of whatever catastrophe had befallen them, she couldn't afford to keep hiding behind doors and Reploids just because of one bad incident.

Besides, her meeting Elec may just prove useful to her current research focus.

Rock perked up, quickly fabricating the mock account, making it feel like the Reploids as much as he could, copying what he'd seen Blues do, then 'logged in' to the network. He almost didn't restrict who could see and interact with him. After a moment, he located Alouette on the network and sent her a message, '_Alouette! I want to come over to play, but X needs to talk to Ciel so he asked me to let you know that she'll have company very soon. Is that okay?_'

Alouette perked up immediately, smiling and giggling as she linked with Rock. '_Mister Rock!_' she said happily. '_I'm not done cleaning my room yet, but I can let Sis know. Is…_' her voice was a bit hesitant, '_is your big brother coming with you?_'

Rock hesitated for a moment, becoming uneasy again at the thought of Blues' current condition, '_No. Blues is…he's still sleeping._' Rock didn't want to scare her by saying he was actually offline. '_We want him to rest until he feels better._'

'_Okay!_' she chirped. '_Sis is probably still working on her project, but I'm sure she'll be okay with you and Mister X coming to say hi. She's been…kinda quiet lately._' She suddenly stopped, her communication line falling quiet for a moment. '_Mister Rock, do you know what happened to the lights earlier?_' There was a hint of unease in her voice when she asked. Grabbing her doll, she started making her way to Ciel's lab.

'_You can just call me Rock, Alouette._' Mentally, they were near the same age, '_But…the lights going out was maintenance, wasn't it?_' Which wasn't a lie: as far as the Robot Masters were concerned, that was completely justified emergency maintenance on a failing system. Elec couldn't not address it immediately.

'_I didn't think about that,_' she said. '_I'll see you soon!_' she said, waiting a moment before disconnecting from private chat.

Rock smiled softly, then looked to X again. "She said she'll let Ciel know."

"Thank you," X said. "Elec, we'll be heading to the second level," he told his brother. "Either of you have the lift?"

"I got it," Elec said as they came to a stop at where the lift docked. After several moments, the lift arrived with a slight hissing sound and they boarded, Elec ordering it to the second level without stopping to pick up other passengers.

Alouette was waiting by the lift, smile on her face, when the platform finally reached the second level. Her smile faltered for a moment as she pondered the new robot holding Rock. "Hi," she said finally, then immediately brightened. "Hi! I'm Alouette!" she greeted, holding out her hand. Maybe this one was nicer than the one in sunglasses?

Elec smiled and accepted Alouette's offered hand, shaking it while still holding Rock with the other arm, "I'm Elec, Alouette. It's nice to meet you," and okay, yes, this child unit was cute. Elec wondered if they started the Reploids this way and upgraded them as they grew? Except no, that'd be terribly inefficient, wouldn't it? Weren't parts a bit hard to come by?

Rock was smiling widely now, looking down to Alouette, "He's one of my big brothers, but Blues is the biggest."

"You look a lot different than Mister Blues or Rock, Mister Elec," Alouette said, looking over Elec for a long moment. She giggled a bit, bounced, and then reached for Rock. "C'mon, Rock, the fishies are waiting for us!" She motioned for Rock to get down, to go with her, even though she'd noticed Rock holding onto his brother just as tightly as he had Blues days before. She really hoped that he wasn't upset with her or with someone at the base.

Being upset wasn't something she liked seeing in her friends, especially when there was so much fun to be had around the base.

Elec didn't give Rock the chance to be reluctant to get down, didn't give him a chance to decide that being shy was his newest personality trait. He deposited Rock on the ground and pushed on his back lightly, reassuring Rock over their link: yes, he should go play. Like a _normal_ child. Elec ignored Alouette's comment about him looking a lot different from Rock and Blues; among the Robot Masters, those two were the odd ones out. The twins and Blues were the only three that were built to look so human they could potentially blend in, had Rock not been so recognizable and Blues been so unwilling to even begin to pretend to try to act.

Alouette smiled even wider, grabbing Rock's hand and pulling him along to her room. She'd told the Jangyo they were having company before she'd gone to Ciel's room, and while she was probably going to take Rock to see Ciel later, the fishies were more important.

X laughed as he watched the two units move through the hallways. "I'm glad Rock made friends with her. With most of us being adult-level AI, there aren't a lot of people that take time out for her." X sighed a bit. "Well, let's introduce you to Ciel and Milan, see how things go from there." He really hoped that Ciel wouldn't panic or lock up the way she'd been around Blues.

Elec nodded, mentally cataloguing these names and adding details alongside them. Blues hadn't actually included detailed profiles about the Resistance members, only for X and Zero, and given how frustrated the unit had grown with the people here, it wasn't surprising. Elec needed to compile a more detailed list, however, and though Rock was able to help a little bit, he needed to gather data for himself. He knew what kind of data he was looking for, after all.


	26. Welcome Additions

_Alright, here we are at chapter twenty-six. Elec's appearance surprised many of our readers, and I assure you, we meant it that way. Everything will be explained in due time, but as it stands right now, you get to know about as much as X does in regards to the Robot Masters. It's not any fun to show our cards so early in the game, after all._

_I'd like to especially thank our reviewers that provided such comprehensive concrit. The points you brought up are now being focused on when I settle down for editing. The fun thing about any art form, be it drawing or writing, is that you never actually reach the top tier, that it's always an ongoing process. You're always learning, always improving, and always in flux. There's very rarely a solid answer for anything and it's that workability that gives us such a large variety of styles and genres. One of my greatest worries with such a long story is that it'd begin to feel like filler, but it seems that thus far, we've completely avoided putting our readers through that. _

_The only drawback here is that we have so much prewritten: the changes can only be applied in editing and not in practice. Once Midnyght gets her internet back, we will begin writing in earnest once again, but don't worry, updates will continue on schedule for the foreseeable future._

_Anyway, in here Elec is introduced to the Resistance properly, Ciel finally begins to open up to the Robot Masters, and Rock proves to be far more perceptive than an apparent newbuilt should be._

_Did I mention we don't own Mega Man or any involved characters? This is fan fiction and really, we're not profiting off it. Midnyght would have had a new computer a month ago if we were._

* * *

><p>X pressed his energy against Ciel's door controls, catching her attention by setting off the soft chime. "Hey, Ciel," he called, walking in just a few steps ahead of Elec. "How are things going?"<p>

"They're fine enough, although I'm still a little bit worried about Milan and Alouette after all that's happened. Milan seemed okay once I got him back online, but it's still," and she paused for a moment, "I'll be keeping an eye on him for the next few days just to make sure he's okay. And Alouette seemed pretty upset during the power outage, but she'll be…" Her voice trailed off as she turned from her terminal, her eyes falling on Elec almost immediately.

_Don't lock up, don't lock up, _X thought, raising his hands in a defensive gesture as he stepped between Ciel and Elec. "Ciel, relax," he said, noticing the way her posture had changed. "This is another of my family members, one of my other older brothers." He stepped a little closer. "This is Elec."

It took a moment for Ciel to gather herself together, but she stood, bowing toward the unit. "A pleasure and an honor," she said. Last thing she needed was to piss off _another_ one of the Robot Masters.

"It's good to meet you, too," Elec replied easily, keeping his general posture relaxed as he slated his displays to avoid any potentially intimidating or threatening gestures. To think that something as simple as crossing one's arms could be interpreted as disapproving. The human was younger than Elec expected and he estimated late teens, though she had a deceptively young face. She appeared to be in good health, so she was at least being looked after. She was intimidated, though, and Elec quickly surmised it was because of Blues. As nonthreatening as the unit appeared, his glare could cut right through a person.

Understanding how he thought helped immensely with that, however.

Ciel remained quiet for a while, and it took X a moment to realize that she was alone in the room. "Ciel, where's Milan?"

"Downstairs in Cerveau's lab, I hope. I asked him to check and see if Cerveau had a new condenser ring, see if I can't get around to testing something else with the Energen Crystals. I'm starting to think I get how the elves use them, but I want to try a quick test run before I jump the gun."

"Condenser ring?" X asked. "You're planning on testing plasma energy output?"

"Figured it was easier than trying to figure out how to get an electrical feed through a crystal. Besides, a low-energy shot shouldn't do too much. I just have to make sure I get one of the elves to charge the crystal."

X nodded. "Set the crystal to…" He stopped, then looked to his brother. '_Maybe you could help. We've been trying to figure out if and how we could use Energen Crystals as an add-on to the power grid, since the crystals tend to work as amplifiers. Increased output and such. You mind giving it a look?_' X's face clearly read that he wasn't trying to force Elec, that he was honestly a little nervous about asking him so suddenly.

'_I could take a look,_' Elec agreed, keeping one eye on the human's body language even though, at the moment, he appeared to be looking around the lab. The style of the equipment here was different, but it had been a few centuries, but Elec was fairly certain he recognized most, if not all, of it.

Ciel noticed the lightning bolt image on the Robot Master almost as soon as he'd walked in the room, but had remained quiet, remembering what Blues had said before about the differences between the industrial units and the human interface units. She debated with herself as to whether or not she wanted to address the unit, and then realized that, other than 'Master',—and that honorific had been vetoed for a while now—there wasn't a title she knew to use with him. "Is…is there something you're looking for?" she finally asked.

Elec would have facepalmed had he not been absolutely certain that the gesture would make the human even more uncomfortable. Well, he could do some human interface work of his own; he had to deal with the humans in the plants he worked in, after all. There wasn't a liaison there for him then. It helped that he actually had a humanlike face and body. "Blues is going to be down doing maintenance for a while," Elec began, though he didn't elaborate on what kind and how long, "so I came to look after Rock and help out where I could." He made it sound like this was a family function of X's. Elec glanced at X, certain that the Cyber Elf was inwardly facepalming, too. "I'm well-acquainted with power systems, so why don't you let me take a look?" If she was the only researcher working on this here, she might be hitting a brick wall because there wasn't a second mind bouncing fresh ideas off of her.

X had to try so hard to bite back the sigh, to keep from letting his face and his hand get reacquainted. For all her technological prowess, Ciel was sorely lacking in terms of interpersonal relationship and communications skills. Couldn't she see in his designs that he was accustomed to working with power systems? Were it not for the fact that his memories from 20XX were a little fuzzy, he would have balked at the fact that she couldn't tell that Elec was really distinctly meant to _look_ like a battery.

Ciel rooted around in her desk for a moment, coming over to Elec with a handful of soft blue gems. "These are the crystals we've been using as a secondary power source for the Reploids, and primary for the Cyber Elves. With," she said, handing the crystals to Elec, "with Reploids, their systems break them down and cause a reaction with whatever power they have left in their charge tanks, adding to their existent charge in the interim between charge cycles," if that interim was necessary or unavoidable. "I know how to build Reploids with the conversion system, but I can't quite figure out how a power plant would utilize it. The conversion system is relatively small and self-contained, so…" She flushed a little in embarrassment. "That and utility engineering isn't really my strong point," she admitted, looking to the floor.

Elec held the crystal up, his head tilting slightly as he scanned it. He was frowning slightly, still a bit puzzled, then asked, "So you want to use these to amplify the power output from the generators? But why would you need to? I've already adjusted the coding to be as near maximum productivity as it can go from that end, and basic, mundane parts can do the rest of the work."

"That…the power outage was…" Ciel shook her head. "These aren't for here," she said. "This isn't research I'm doing for the base. It's for Neo Arcadia, for the city we're trying to reclaim." She looked to X. "Has anyone filled him in on what's going on?"

"Not in any great detail," Elec said, stilling inspecting one of the crystals, running a plethora of scans on it and recording its properties. "The 000 unit, Blues didn't have a chance to go into specifics before he offlined and I've been here all of what, two hours?" He sort of shrugged, blinking as he chose another crystal to scan, bringing up comparative data charts. "These have a lot of energy in them, considering their mass." Although, they were laughably weak compared to the thing in Blues' chest cavity.

Ciel nodded, then turned to X.

"The city that we used to live in, that I ran before things happened, has been experiencing a severe energy crisis in recent years, but we've not been able to determine why. We've been over the coding, the systems, everything, and while geothermal energy isn't the most efficient means of powering the city, it's the safest thing we have, considering the state of the planet and the fact that we have to protect what's left of both the human and Reploid populations." They couldn't do that very well if their charges were left exposed to the environment as it was. "Ciel's research is meant to help us figure out a way to correct the energy crisis so that we don't take the city back only for it to fail beneath us because we couldn't fix the problems that weren't directly related to the individuals in charge right now."

Though it wasn't really like X blamed anyone for what had happened. Somebody seemed to have been pulling a lot of strings, especially with how quickly and unquestioningly Copy X had taken control.

Elec lowered his arm and looked to Ciel and X, frowning thoughtfully. "Geothermal energy…" _Well._ That was interesting. And a potential non-problem in the near future. Doubly so if it stopped being _Elec's_ problem. "When did the crisis start?"

"About a decade ago," X said. "Like I said, we tried to figure out why, but there wasn't much we could figure out."

The sound of soft bootfalls echoed from the hallway beyond, a familiar flash of black and white armor coming to a stop outside of Ciel's room. "Father, I heard from the security monitors that…" Phantom fell silent, looking at the newcomer and recognizing him from Rock's memory. "Uncle Elec?" Well, _that_ explained the power outage.

X smirked, though he shook his head. That was the _second_ time in just as many days that Phantom had flown into a room without actually trying to mask his approach. He hoped that the Reploid at least had his firewalls up this time. "Elec, this is my youngest son, Phantom. Phantom, Elec," X said, and there was a bit of a strained laugh in his voice.

Elec blinked at the title of 'uncle', but didn't reject it. It was just a bit startling how successfully humanlike these Reploids were. He still had the Energen Crystals in his hands, so he didn't offer a handshake, but he nodded to Phantom, "It's good to meet you, Phantom." Blues didn't say _anything_ about X having 'child' units and he had to quickly veto the idea that X was their Master, even if that was the closest approximation the Robot Masters had to that relationship in most cases.

Phantom bowed. "An honor," he said.

"Was there any other reason you came rushing up here like something happened?" X asked.

"I…uh…" the Guardian looked down. "I wanted to ask about yesterday, after what happened, and the—"

X cut Phantom off, immediately aware of where his line of thought was going. "I'll take care of that momentarily, Phantom. I wanted Elec to get a chance to meet Ciel, seeing as her current research ties in very closely with his particular skillset." X blinked then. "Actually, Phantom, I need you to do me a favor. If Ciel doesn't mind," and he looked to the girl, thankful when she shrugged and made a motion of 'well, why would I?', "could you get on the comm network and call Cerveau, Rocinolle and a few of the sec team up here. I'd like to let them know about Elec." _And Shadow_, he thought. The information would trickle down from those officers as it had the day before in the wake of what had happened with Zero.

Elec handed the Energen Crystals back to Ciel, glad to see that the girl was finally relaxing some, even if she was still slightly on edge. A quick check-in with Rock showed that he and Alouette were still happily playing with the Jangyo. Rock always liked animals. '_If you want Rock to stay out of the room for this discussion, I can instruct him to stay in Alouette's room to play until further notice,_' Elec told X; if there was going to be _any_ discussion of the assault on Blues yesterday, Elec did not want Rock in earshot.

'_That would be for the best,_' X said. '_I doubt anything too serious will come up since I already addressed most of what happened yesterday, but just in case, he can stay there._'

"Phantom, have you gotten responses from anyone?"

"They're on their way."

"I thought everything was addressed yesterday," Ciel said, "or are you calling them here to introduce them to your brother?"

X nodded. "It's really just introductions and a chance for them to be aware of the increased Robot Master presence in the base." That there were a few spots of deep shadow in Ciel's lab worked to his benefit. '_Shadow, last chance to say you want to stay unseen,_' X offered across the link.

'_The intention was never to hide my presence indefinitely; that Protocol was the largest threat within the base, and it was its probable presence that caused me to be summoned here in the first place. Knowing that I'm around does not give any opponents much of an edge; even Break…even Proto Man cannot sense me reliably._' Shadow shrugged, '_Additionally, when Zero does finally crawl from his room, I have no doubt that he will be making reference to me, and possibly throw a fit if his 'brother' _wasn't_ introduced._'

'_Was just clarifying that before I opened my mouth and did something out of line,_' X said, throwing a sidelong glance at his son. That the Reploid had earned such disapproval from two separate Robot Masters had upset him—though X was quicker still to judge himself as having been far worse than his son in their eyes.

It really felt as if Rock was the only one that wasn't upset with him for something, and that was only because Rock was too much of a newbuilt to critique him.

Ciel and Elec were both sitting by the time the other Resistance members started to filter into the room, Ciel having offered the Robot Master a chair as X dropped into a hover nearby.

Phantom remained close to the door, respectfully refusing a seat. Because the security team was considering him joining them, he wanted to be ready to leave the room if anyone called for him.

X had to motion for a few of the units to quiet down as they entered the room, their eyes immediately on the Robot Master settled near X, a mixture of confusion and quiet apprehension in their gazes.

"Another one?" Milan asked as he walked into the room, setting the condenser ring he'd gotten from the storage rooms down on Ciel's workbench. "Not that I mean that in a bad way," he said, raising his hands defensively. "I'm just a little shocked. Blues didn't really give anyone an idea that there were more than just him and Rock."

"He wouldn't have," Elec said, frowning slightly, but at Blues' tendencies and not anything Milan said. He knew that X already screamed at Blues at least once and even though Elec honestly couldn't blame X for it—Blues could really be infuriating—he was glad Rock explained exactly _why_ screaming was a bad idea.

And really, it wasn't entirely Blues' fault he was a bit of an ass; Doctor Light was the one that programmed his personality.

Colbor and Faucon both nodded at the unit. "Your brother," Faucon said, "seems to be a bit on the quiet side, though it seems more from the fact that he makes himself unapproachable than anything else."

Colbor nodded in agreement. "It's good to see that another progenitor unit has survived this long," he said, "though it does leave me a little concerned that you've been able to get past security without anyone noticing."

"Colbor does have a point. How were you able to get past security?" Not that the blackout earlier hadn't really messed them up, but Faucon was interested. They were really going to have to step up security if this kept up.

Elec frowned slightly again, as though that they couldn't figure out why puzzled him, "I teleported in." There were absolutely no shields and with the coordinates provided to him, down to the decimal point? It was like going out to get milk.

Rocinolle was the first to find her voice. "How is that possible? Someone from security would have logged the Trans Server going active. Beyond that, Elec, you would have needed the Server's transmission code." Was this unit able to teleport without it? Considering Blues' skills, she wouldn't doubt that Elec would have been able to hack through that without issue, but still…

"Trans Server?" Elec raised an eyebrow, or would have had his mask not covered that portion of his face. "What are you talking about?"

X actually facepalmed that time. "We'll get you full loads for the Trans Server specs and get you up to speed in the next few hours," X said, '_unless you're already on the networks, since the data should be there anyway. I didn't think that Blues left you this woefully uninformed about the situation._' Though, realistically, Blues hadn't really had a chance to do so, and by the time Elec had arrived, he'd already been offline for maintenance.

"…So you didn't use the Trans Server, but you can't teleport without one," Cerveau said, frowning. Or had the Robot Master used it without knowing what it was? No, that wasn't possible either; he'd need the code. He may have been able to hack a code, but he'd have needed to know what the Trans Server was to begin with to manage that.

'_He didn't so much talk to me as send me a priority alert,_' Elec told X. There really hadn't been any actual words exchanged, '_His signal was choppy, distorted, and erratic; he was under duress at the time, but it wasn't a request to come immediately. Once I arrived, he was offline, and then I authorized his full maintenance cycles._'

To Cerveau and the rest of the Resistance, he said, "So the Trans Server is a designated teleportation point? A machine?" When it looked like he was correct, he continued, "All Robot Masters were equipped with teleportation capabilities; each of us had personal teleporters. Blues and Rock each have one, too. If we know the coordinates, we can teleport anywhere, provided there are no shields in place."

"So you can teleport practically unimpeded to whatever location you specify?" Phantom was astounded. "I'm guessing that even if we did have teleportation shielding mechanisms, they'd be kind of sub-par and easily hacked, though?" That the other Robot Masters he'd met seemed to just shrug at whatever coding they were looking at and drop in fresh lines—and that didn't even touch on Rock's locking program, which Phantom had quickly realized was dialed well below the code on Blues' door.

"We haven't had personal teleportation capabilities of that magnitude for quite a number of years," Rocinolle added.

"It was necessary to execute our duties: I had run of twelve different power plants over four continents that I was personally responsible for. I would teleport between the facilities, working where I was needed." Of course, by then the beta testing was completed seven times over and each facility ran like a well-oiled machine.

Power plants? And his name was Elec. Cerveau's eyes widened, "Wait, that power outage, that was _you_?"

Of course it was. Elec inclined his head, "Of course, that was the first thing I checked after I gained network access." And now, it was working for real, not like a half-rigged machine.

"Network…" Faucon was linking a private comm line with half the security monitors by the time he'd finished his thought. "Master X, no offense to your brother, but the monitors aren't seeing them online at all."

"And I would have figured you heard what Phantom said about their hacking capabilities," X retorted. "They're on the network, but they're not displaying as actively logged in, and I don't' want to hear word one about this being a security risk. With them on the network, we're actually a lot better off than you might imagine, seeing as their level of administrative control trumps _mine_," and, honestly, it was for the best if the Robot Masters remained as they were on the networks. The Resistance members were not ready for the experience of a Robot Master actually claiming_ public_ admin rights to their network. For all of X's pride and confidence, he had been made to feel all of three inches tall. The Resistance members? They'd be blips eclipsed in the shadow of even a single Robot Master on the network, let alone the four that were there.

"That does, however, sort of bring up a point I wanted to address with you. Now, I'm fully aware that the Reploid Viral Infection Symptom Identification Act from the Maverick Wars is still, for whatever reason, sitting on the law books in Neo Arcadia"—X was going to have to amend that—"so I know that seeing a unit with red eyes is going to raise a few flags."

"There's another unit?" Ciel asked. "Or just another that you're aware of?"

"Another unit," X said, "But this is one of Zero's brothers, though he's got close ties to my own."

"And the red eyes?" Rocinolle asked.

"Characteristic that he was built with," X said, "and predates the Act anyway, so it's not indicative of anything other than his construction specifications."

Elec nodded slightly; X was talking about Shadow Man now. He knew the Wilybot was around, they sort of acknowledged each other on the network, but he didn't forge a real link with him, only allowed basic communications. He was Blues' bodyguard, not Elec's.

Shadow was, in fact, in the room, having found a nice shadow to lurk in after checking in on Zero again: the android was still curled up on his bed, brooding. Shadow himself was facepalming at how completely Blues failed to debrief Elec—and that really, Shadow should have anticipated it and sent the Lightbots a report to bring them up to speed—but the members seemed to accept Elec's presence well enough, even if the security team still didn't believe that they were online.

"After what happened yesterday," Milan asked, careful to avoid any direct mentions of the incident, "we're not dealing with a sibling coded the same way as Master Zero was, are we?"

"Of course not," a new voice said, and Shadow materialized from one of the dark patches near the lab equipment, one eye closed as he looked over the Resistance members, the lower half of his face covered by his mask. His arms were crossed as he leaned against the bit of equipment, his gaze focusing on X.

Ciel managed to choke down most of her surprised squeak, turning in her chair to look at the newcomer. "Where?"

"Out of the shadows," Colbor noted. "How…?"

"They're constructed with abilities far different from our own, even those of the Mythos units in Neo Arcadia," X answered, leaning back as he adjusted his hovering height a bit, looking more now as if he were reclining in a large, high-backed chair. "And while I have been impressed with your recent improvements across the communications network, I don't want to see this little revelation undoing all of that." X had had _enough_ with all of their idle banter and wildlyspun theories. "Just like yesterday, this matter is to be discussed with units in person and remain completely off the network. I hear word one from any of the four Robot Masters currently linked into _any_ of our networks, and there will be access revocations."

X hadn't missed the way that some of the security team that had remained silent was now looking at Shadow.

"Canard, is there an issue?" X asked of one unit in particular.

The Reploid shook his head. "No…no, sir," he replied curtly.

"And we are present on _all_ networks," Shadow added, tearing his red gaze from X to the grouping of Reploids and the human in the room. Elec remained relaxed in his seat, not at all alarmed by Shadow's appearance. Both Robot Masters noted the curt tone in that Reploid in particular, but both were already well-acquainted to having individuals glaring daggers into their backs. '_I just checked on Zero again; he hasn't budged,_' Shadow sent to X privately, knowing that he was concerned about Zero as well. He'd add that Blues hadn't budged, but Blues was offline. It'd be far more alarming if he _had_ budged.

'_Thank you,_' X sent.

"I have a question," Ciel said. "I get that Elec has only been here a short while." She pointed briefly to the Robot Master leaning against part of her workstation. "How long has he been here?"

"Here as in 'at the base', or here as in 'in the room'?" X asked.

Half a dozen eyes widened at that question.

"Perhaps answering both would be preferred," Faucon managed after a moment. That _two_ had gotten past the security team? Not that he could blame them with this unit's particular abilities, but it did set him a little on edge, and another message fired off to the monitors elsewhere on the floor.

Shadow didn't budge from where he was leaning against the equipment, arms still crossed like he was waiting at a bus stop, "I followed X and Elec into the room," so he'd heard everything thus far, "and I've been here in the base long enough. Certainly before Rock was wakened."

Faucon nodded at that, receiving an incoming message from Vigile and reading over it quickly. "Shadow, I do have a question regarding your—"

Shadow cut Faucon off mid-question. "By our standards, you don't _have_ any security here. The network is completely open and unprotected to us: you should be _relieved_ that Proto Man took ownership of the networks before someone who _does_ know how to hack meandered online. No, I will not divulge a reliable way to track my movements. Incoming teleports can be sensed but not blocked: they must be blocked and cut off before initialization begins," so the timing the Protocol had in blocking Blues' teleporter was _flawless,_ "and doing that is nigh impossible, even to us. If you want a teleport shield put in place, talk to Proto Man. I have no say in the matter."

"Proto Man?" Rocinolle asked.

"Blues," Elec supplied, still seated, still lounging a bit, "The proper designation for DLN-000 is Proto Man. Blues is…Blues is the name he was given around the house," before everything fell apart.

Rocinolle nodded in understanding, quickly tacking the name on as a secondary identification tag for her sensei.

"While it's…disconcerting to think that we have no security, that…" Faucon rubbed his chin, trying to find a way to phrase his question, "your analysis may be coming from a different perspective, seeing as your generation is more adept with coding." He was hesitant to voice his actual question now. "Or is that being said of our systems, of the networks here, because there are other Robot Masters that aren't," on our side wouldn't be the proper term, he figured, "kind enough to add their expertise to our efforts?"

Both Shadow and Elec were silent for several moments. In the end, it was Elec that answered, "Any that felt that this effort wasn't worth their time wouldn't waste their time coming out here to mess with it. What we are more guarding against, aside from the off chance of a coder that skilled originating in this time period, is…" Elec hesitated for a moment, clearly thinking of the best and least worrisome way to put this, "is units coming here with the intention to help whose definition of 'help' may not fall in line with the definition the rest of the world uses."

"Other units like yourself?" Canard asked. "Or were there more than two family lines?"

"There were three main family lines, not counting miscellaneous, small-name builders," Elec answered, his head tilted, thinking. "I do not think anyone will come here to hinder or hurt the efforts here. Like I said, those that aren't interested won't bother."

"So there are others still active?" Canard continued. "This…Blues did not give the impression that there were others, although I think a small part of the confusion may be stemming from the fact that, at least for me, I'm still not quite past the fact that Master X _lied_ to us to cover for Blues."

"Proto Man would not have said anything: that kind of data is on a need-to-know basis," Shadow cut in, his voice holding a hint of disapproval, then continued, "X took a great deal of care to explain why he covered for him, so I do not see what is so confusing about it." Or was Canard's processor that slow?

"Why it's confusing," Canard explained, his voice growing a bit sharp, "is the fact that Master X lied to us and, in essence, has continued to propagate that lie by not letting us know about your presence until well after you've wandered in here, acting as if you own this base, as if you're better than us."

"Canard," X reprimanded, ready to get to his feet if the security officer continued.

Elec raised an arm, signaling to X to calm down. "Well after I wandered in here? Are your audio receptors broken? I've been here all of three hours, and I guarantee you that X did not know about Shadow until it became necessary he appear. Furthermore, I immediately brought the power offline to make _your base_ run thirty percent more efficiently, so how do you propose he get the word out with the power down and you all running around like headless chickens? But now we're sitting here, in this room, talking. _Immediately after my arrival_. Your criticism is foolish and unwarranted."

"My _criticism_ is absolutely warranted!" Canard fired back. "Until Blues and Rock showed up, we didn't have to de—"

"That is _**enough**_," X said, stepping past Elec, his halo resonating a deep azure. "How you seem so dead set on pissing off every one of my family members is beyond me. I have told you, time and time again, that you need to get your attitude in check. And yes, Canard, you acting this way _is_ foolish and unwarranted. I am trying to do everything I can for this Resistance, for each and every one we save from the city, for the city itself when this finally runs its course. If that means that I have to take a moment to orient _myself_ around the idea that, hey, look, I have another brother in the base, you should be more than thankful that I'm actually letting you meet him instead of you inadvertently letting your idiocy and your ignorance cross the wrong person." He glared at the unit, a motion that proved highly imposing with the pitch black hue of his right eye imposed so oddly against the blue-green glow of his left.

Elec _felt_ the energy in the air change, his sensors registering a change in X's aura—he was manifested energy, Elec realized, and what he just did to the Reploid was with an electrical current, run through his systems to interrupt functions in the Reploids. That was…that was handy.

Elec sighed; this unit, this Reploid, was young and brash, but all bark and no bite. "You've heard that I'm an industrial unit, which is true." Elec raised an arm, a tingling feeling like static electricity pervading the room. His gaze was focused on Canard now, "And you do speak English, so I'm surprised that you didn't connect my designation with my directives and realize what that combined _means_. I'm _Elec_ Man." And with that, Elec assumed control of the hack from X, "Five hundred _thousand_ volts of electricity is _nothing_ to me." He held Canard then, on his own.

"_I_ am not a violent unit, but there are others that _are_. There are others that would _accept_ your challenge and take it _seriously_. I don't want to see you get hurt because you can't watch your mouth," and that said nothing of Elec's immense irritation at how this unit completely disregarded X's emotional needs. Honestly, it was like a petulant teen, no longer a newbuilt but still short on experiential data, still short on reason.

Canard struggled against the hack, trying in vain to break the hold on his systems, and sighed heavily when his efforts proved in vain. "You're just as bad as Copy—"

"Canard, _shut up_!" X screamed. "Stop trying to prove yourself! You don't need to do this, regardless of how you feel!" X took a deep breath, letting himself relax. "Do _not_ compare me to the thing ruling my city. Do _not_ compare my family to him. We are trying to _teach_ you. Copy X would be happy just to see you _dead_." He had, after all, signed off on Canard's retirement order.

"You never used to be like this before they came," Canard said, unable to bring his eyes up to the Resistance leader.

"I never knew how much I didn't know before they came," X admitted. "Do you think I'm taking this well, finding out how inept _I was_ at breaking my own coding? How many years, Canard, were spent analyzing my drives? I know you're familiar with that much of our history. Blues broke the encryption on all of it in _four hours_." He knelt down so that he could actually look Canard in the eyes. "We are all feeling the changes that come with the Robot Masters being part of our team, part of our family here. Don't think that you're alone in all this because you're not."

Rocinolle couldn't help but gawk at X. "Blues-sensei cracked _everything_ in four hours?" That he was a good coder wasn't really a question she needed to ask, but to have deciphered the undecipherable?

Cerveau frowned thoughtfully, "Judging by the incident yesterday, he cracked _Master_ _Zero's_ code as well, didn't he?"

X nodded. "He did."

Rocinolle's eyes widened perceptibly. "Master X, with your permission, I'd like to return to my lab and get back to work." Whenever Blues woke, she wanted to have the lab _ready_ and her assignments completed and double-checked. Possibly quadruple-checked, just to be sure.

"If your work is that important," X said, smiling as he got back to his feet, "go on ahead."

Rocinolle bowed deeply and darted from the room.

Elec released Canard from his grasp. "Honestly, Blues is the best person to have handed the coding for either unit to for deciphering, outside of their builders. He was built for the purpose of figuring out the solution sets we'd all use. He was built to _code_. And he's damn _good_ at it." Of course, that was only one facet of Blues, but Elec thought they didn't need to know all of that.

"He's incredibly skilled," X said, sure that every unit in the room would agree with that assessment. "However, I do think that this little meet and greet has run its course, so if you would all return to your stations?" X smiled at the units, save for Canard, who received a warning glare.

The Reploids quickly filtered out, and X dropped back into his hover, looking to Ciel.

"That could have gone a little better," she said, a nervous smile on her face.

"Phantom," X said as he looked to his son, "if we do another introduction, try to remember that Canard generally isn't welcome."

Phantom nodded his head in understanding.

"One petulant unit shouldn't reflect on the group as a whole," Elec said, sitting back down in the chair Ciel provided for him, though he was still annoyed with Canard. "I take it he hasn't tried anything like that with Blues, but does he know to stay away from Rock?"

"He knows well enough to stay away from Rock," X said. "He hasn't crossed Blues, and I honestly don't even think they've met yet."

Elec nodded in approval: so long as he stayed far from Rock. Blues he wasn't worried about. Should Canard cross him, it was _Canard_ they should worry for. "I can understand where his concern originates: unknowns are always worrisome, but he should have a data set to disprove his theory by now."

"I think a greater deal of his issue comes with the city, with the way Copy X sees our people as expendable, as a resource that can be tossed away when it becomes too troublesome to maintain."

"It's worse," Phantom added, "when you realize that our resources aren't as strained as the city is led to believe. He's managed to exacerbate the issue by limiting and rationing our supplies when the city is looking for retirees."

"That he's acting like that at all really worries me, makes me wonder who could have programmed him so horribly." Had Ciel been the one to finish his coding, it was likely that the city would have eventually had X and his copy ruling side-by-side.

"Coding that faulty…" Shadow paused, frowning, "I do not think that it's a result of ineptitude or carelessness. It's too well-covered within the city." Had the Copy's coding truly been accidental, he'd not have slid into power so seamlessly. Shadow didn't voice it aloud, but he honestly was beginning to think that the Copy was _deliberate_.

"I'm starting to think the same," X agreed. "Though I'm absolutely confused as to who it might be that would want something like this for Neo Arcadia." For X, the city had been hope, the ray of light cutting through the darkness that had fallen after the war. Now? It was the darkness everyone feared.

_And all the more reason to get my siblings out of that accursed place… _ Phantom suddenly straightened up. "Father, I have somewhere I need to be. If you'd excuse me?" And, as an afterthought, "Shadow-sama, if I could speak with you?"

Shadow blinked, but nodded slowly, stepping away from the equipment, his right eye still closed as he estimated how much time he had left before he needed to check on Zero. Well, if they weren't done speaking by then, he could excuse himself to do it, then return. It wouldn't take long, not unless Zero was all clingy again.

"Um…Elec," Ciel said, "with…" She stopped, took a deep breath, and looked to the Robot Master again. "Since your abilities have such direct application with what I'm working with, maybe it would be best if I gave this project to you and worked as an assistant. My skills are more geared toward Reploid engineering and development, as well as coding, which, given what Blues is capable of with mere mechaniloids, doesn't really add up to much against your capabilities." She bit her lip as she waited for Elec to answer.

Elec looked at Ciel, a strange look coming over his face. He didn't look offended and he didn't look like he agreed that Ciel was too incompetent to run the project. He looked _surprised_. And, inwardly, he _was_. A human not only offered to give up a project to him, but she _deferred to him_ and essentially requested that he lead her. Three centuries dormant and the entire planet spun a full 180 degrees. He was being acknowledged as a person. By a human. Granted, he knew it shouldn't be that amazing; the Cossacks viewed them as equals, too, even the daughter, but still.

It was a novel feeling to him.

And now the human looked nervous, like she was afraid she'd overstepped her bounds, so he finally found his voice, "Don't discredit yourself too much," it wasn't something to feel bad over. "Why don't you show me what, exactly, this project _is_ first?"

Ciel nodded, swiping one hand over her console to wake it from standby, keying in her access code and moving aside to let the Robot Master take a look. "That's everything I've managed so far with the research project. If you want to see how the Cyber Elves are able to affect the crystals, I'll call Alouette in here. She's the best unit we've got when it comes to working with the elves."

Elec leaned down to look at the monitor, much more human in his actions than Blues had been. He was used to working with humans, and he actually did care a bit about not making Ciel uncomfortable; him appearing to use the computer like a human would help, or so he hoped. Even if he was still reading at machine speed, even if he was still accessing her files wirelessly. He blinked as he flipped through them; it was all about the Energen Crystals and almost nothing about the actual plant they were being applied to. "I can understand how these crystals may work as amplifiers in power production, but being that they're such a limited resource, I wonder if that's really sustainable. But that's not even my biggest…" Elec trailed off, frowning slightly. "Geothermal energy runs on the laws of thermodynamics. I _know_ that those did not change in three hundred years. In my time, geothermal plants were viable power plants that could sustain output over long periods of time, possibly indefinitely depending on where it was. It _worked_ then, so why isn't it for you now? Do you have any data on the plants themselves?"

"We're honestly not sure," X said, stepping closer to the two. He looked at Milan expectantly, as if wondering why the Reploid was keeping near the door, then shrugged when Milan shook his head. Apparently, the unit was content just with standing watch over Ciel. "The problems started before the incident with Dark Elf, so I tried to deal with it then. Some of the work we did with the turbines did manage to up their efficiency, but about a year and a half, maybe two years later, it started tapering again."

Ciel nodded, making a soft sound of assent. "I remember that you ended up sending surveillance mechaniloids and a few of the heat-tolerant Mythos Reploids down for observation."

"I did. I was afraid that there may have been some sort of tectonic activity that disrupted the heat source, but nothing was wrong with any of the system that far down. We ended up rebuilding all of the turbines in stages just to make sure that it wasn't that having issues, and still…" X shrugged. "Every single part of that system was running at what should have been prime condition four years ago. Now? Unless Copy X did something to exacerbate the issue, it's still just us staring at the plant and scratching our collective heads."

"I'd need data to begin to guess what's going on with the plant," Elec said, still staring at the coding with a slight frown, "because even if we do come up with an amplification, if there's something grossly wrong with the plant, it's like trying to plug leaks with tissue paper." And Elec was thinking that there were better uses for those crystals at any rate. "Although, in the meantime, the crystals should be analyzed."

"Phantom has data, but it's about three years old, from what he told Blues." X turned to Milan. "You mind sending Phantom a message, let him know we need that file?"

Milan looked to X then, confused. "Master X, Guardian Phantom disconnected from the network shortly after he left the room. I'd have to actually head out to look for him."

_Disconnected?_ X's posture shifted a bit, and he looked worried. "Please do so," he instructed. "We need those files as soon as possible."

"Don't bother: he left with Shadow, so they're likely cloaking," Elec sighed. Phantom looked like he was built to be a stealth unit. And if Shadow didn't want to be found, he wouldn't be, but Elec tried sending a communications request to Shadow either way. After a moment, the Wilybot responded despite Elec being unable to feel him online.

He had to hand it to Shadow: he was a damn effective stealth unit. "He's bringing Phantom now."

Phantom was highly impressed with Shadow, and not simply because of the fact that Shadow was an older ninja, and a _good one_ at that: it was the fact that he could literally melt into shadows at will. A moment before, Shadow had stopped, grabbed his vest, and pulled them both into a shadow.

Where they were right now was anyone's guess, though he was still on the communications network, cloaked as per Shadow's initial request of him. He kept near the Robot Master, careful not to lose track of him, and Phantom quickly engaged his night vision in order to at least help him keep better tabs on the ninja.

"Shadow-sama," Phantom asked, careful to keep his voice low, "how are you able to navigate in all this? I can't see anything other than you, and that's only because you show up with the image enhancements built into my optics."

Shadow glanced back to Phantom, not slowing their trek as he answered the Reploid, "My systems are configured to be able to navigate this space," though honestly, Shadow himself didn't fully understand his own construction. His origins were a well-guarded secret, known only to Blues and a few of the other Wilybots. Even his father hadn't fully understood the technology that he found in Shadow's shattered frame, before he restored him. "Though I'd be worried if you could see things other than myself; there is nothing here but us."

Phantom nodded. "I meant that more in the sense that I'm not seeing an actual floor, even though I'm registering one beneath my feet."

Shadow actually stopped, looking back to Phantom over his shoulder once again, his amused expression lost to the darkness, "There really isn't a floor to speak of," and with that, Shadow whirled around, grabbed Phantom by the vest, and unceremoniously threw him through a portal that just opened to their left. _Well_, Shadow thought, _let's see if this one can at least land on his feet._

Phantom's eyes had widened as he was thrown, but his systems quickly reoriented as he emerged from the shadow near the corner of the ceiling in Ciel's room, the Reploid flipping and catching himself on the wall, holding there for a moment before dropping almost soundlessly to the floor. "You called?" he asked, looking to Elec.

Elec was startled for only an instant, and only because Shadow ripping so blatant a passage through usually left this creep along his processor. It was unmistakable. He turned to his 'nephew', nodding, and said, "X says you have data logs for the power plant. Even if they're dated, I'd like to take a look at them." As Elec spoke, Shadow soundlessly emerged from the floor, near the machine he'd been leaning on earlier.

"I do," Phantom said with a nod. "Is there a particular way you'd like me to transfer the data?"

"Can you interface with the terminal?" Ciel asked.

"Sure can," Phantom said, barely glancing at the machine as he linked into the wireless interface.

Ciel blinked, then turned for the console. "Wait a moment," she said, starting to key in a sequence. "I have to get—"

"Don't bother," Phantom said, the information loading as soon as he established the transfer. "It wasn't that hard to hack a ten-character passcode."

X looked at his son. "That wasn't necessary, Phantom," he scolded. Ciel wouldn't have taken that long to get her security measures deactivated.

Phantom shook his head. "If Shadow-sama is going to help me to be better at the very things you constructed me to excel at, it's necessary to show him where my skillset is currently baselined." He smirked at X. "After all, it's not as if I have to start from Shinobi Basics 101." That had been the name X had joked about when referring to the stealth coding that he'd imparted on his son.

It took a moment for the data to upload to the terminal, but once it did, Elec leaned forward once again, bringing the data up as he copied it into his own systems and began an analysis. Elec was silent for several long moments, then he straightened, a frustrated sound escaping him, not altogether-human as he pinched the bridge of his nose, closing his eyes, in much the same manner as in Rock's memory with Elec and Ice. "How old is this data?"

"Three years and some change," Phantom said. "I wasn't sent back after that day. Copy X said he had other units that would handle it and needed me for other assignments."

"Well, I have some bad news for you," Elec said, turning from the console, his expression one of mild irritation, "The coding is full of edits and addendums. There was some effort put into making it fit in, but I'm sorry, no one _intends_ for a plant to run this way. There are addendums coded specifically to _lower output_ and there seem to be capacitor fluxes; the energy output varies greatly day to day. Fluctuations are normal, but not like this. This is…it dips sharply some days and peaks on others. And given the specs of the plant, it's running at less than _half_ of its maximum efficiency."

Phantom looked to X then. "Didn't you send coders during the early stages of repairs on the generators?"

"I did, but they said they fixed the few problems they found with the coding." And after, the plant had been working at almost peak capacity. "Maybe it was re-edited more recently?"

"What about the Pantheon coding? Uncle Blues mentioned that he felt that if someone had messed with their coding and the emergency response data, they'd affected changes elsewhere in the city. Maybe this is the same individual?"

He didn't want to admit it, but X was sure that was the case. "I can't even begin to think who'd want to do this to Neo Arcadia. Every person I brought into the city…" X dropped into a hover, rubbing at his eyes. "No one would bear ill will towards the city, not before I was removed from the city, before Copy X was put in control."

Elec reached out over his link with X and it flared to a more active status as he sent a feeling of reassurance to the android. "None of these edits are volatile, so the plant isn't being used as a time bomb," and Elec had a creeping suspicion of his own as to why someone may be doing this, but he thought it better not to voice it until he had more data. "But I need a more up-to-date data set from this plant." Ideally, he needed to visit this plant. The city was hostile at the moment, though, wasn't it?

"That won't be too much of a problem to get," Phantom assured. "I know a few tricks for getting the data we need."

"I'll make sure you're informed the next time we're setting up for a raid, then," X said, turning to look at Elec. "Would that be alright by you?"

"That'd be good," Elec agreed. "Even if it takes a little to set up, I'm sure there are other things I could do, and there is Rock to consider." The child was happy now, but his song on the Harmony was still a wavering trill at times, still unsure and still frightened. Still scared. He was clinging to Elec on the network, even as he played with Alouette. It was upsetting to see Rock this way; this was nothing a newbuilt should ever have experienced.

"Unless Hirondelle hears something from the city, we'll be moving out on a raid within the next couple of weeks. We're still a little on edge about going back in, seeing as there were back-to-back raids not too long ago." And one raid that they hadn't even known about until Phantom had shown up.

Which meant that for the moment, research would be Elec's main focus. Or rather, his main focus after Rock. He'd accessed the network, begun going through data files, especially the ones pertaining to Ciel's research, the crystals, and Cyber Elves. After a minute or so, he said, "I've never encountered these crystals before," and their chemical composition didn't match anything in his databanks. "Where are they from?"

"We started mining Energen Crystals back before the start of the Maverick Wars, some two hundred years ago. Back then, they weren't used as much. It was mostly research studies. Some time after we developed a cure for the Virus, we discovered that the crystals would work as a core for the programming that would mature into Cyber Elves. From there, we realized the potential applications for power that they had and a group of engineers figured out how to process them down into something that Reploids could use. Cyber Elves, on the other hand, are able to consume them naturally since they are, at their most basic level, crystals themselves."

"And you're a Cyber Elf in that form, aren't you?" Elec asked. That's what Rock told him, at any rate.

X opened his mouth to answer, paused, and closed his mouth, falling silent for a moment. "I…" he said softly, "I am and I'm not. I don't have a crystal core like they do, wasn't made the same way." Even X himself didn't understand it all. "I have their abilities, but charging, maintaining this form?" He shook his head. "Have to exit this world for Cyberspace every night just to be able to maintain a full-body manifest."

That he'd started off manifesting as a pixie was something he didn't feel like telling anyone. Being on the network with a Robot Master made him feel small enough.

"And from your description, I'll assume you don't process these Energen Crystals?" Elec was tilting his head, processing what he was being told. Gathering data and drawing tentative conclusions.

"I'm not physically here," X admitted with a sigh. "I can't even touch them, let alone process them."

"If that is all you needed this child for," and Shadow motioned to Phantom, "then we will be taking our leave." And continuing on working on Phantom's ninja skills. Because honestly? He was _embarrassing_ Shadow.

X nodded. "For now, yes. If we need either of you for anything else, one of us will get a message through."

Shadow nodded and grabbed the back of Phantom's vest before disappearing with him once again.

Elec was studying X now, analyzing him, scanning him. "You're not…you're definitely _here_, X. You're composed entirely of energy, but you're here." And energy was physical, too, regardless of how impalpable it seemed.

"Energy, yes," X said, "but that's _it_. I can't touch, can't interact," unless he was manifesting his Hacker controls, and even then…

Shaking his head, X moved to the chair that Elec had been sitting in, moving through the object so that everything above his knees was above the seat while the rest of his legs remained below. "I _can't_ touch things on the physical plane anymore. I know I'm here, but I'm not _here_." Not like everyone else was.

Elec considered X for several moments more, then shook his head, a slightly amused look on his face before striding over to the Cyber Elf. A staticky feeling surrounded Elec as he activated his abilities again, though not on so large a scale as before. He generated an electromagnetic field around his hand, his arm, his entire body, invisible to the naked eye, then kicked the chair out from under X, reached out, _grabbed him by the arm_, and pulled him from where he'd been standing, "And what do you think holds everything together, if not energy?" It was that force, after all, that kept molecules together.

X's eyes had gone wide at the contact, a startled cry escaping him, and pressed his hand against Elec's arm.

And _didn't pass through it_.

"How?" he finally managed, and he looked ready to cry.

"When you exerted yourself on that Reploid, I matched it. You're working almost entirely through electromagnetic energy. It's not that difficult to create a field to repel yours. That's why I can touch you. We're repelling one another the way physical objects do." Just like how when one object hit another, it was repelled with equal and opposite force.

X shuddered a bit, reassuring himself that this contact wasn't a trick, that he was actually touching his brother.

And pounced Elec, holding him close, crying though no tears escaped his eyes.

Elec was _not_ expecting a hug. The Robot Master blinked, but returned the gesture after a moment, enclosing X in his arms much as he'd done for Rock barely half an hour before. So Elec reached out to X over their link as well, that being much more familiar ground to the Robot Master, and queried him as well as sent reassurance.

Quick but slightly heavy footfalls sounded in the hall and Rock skidded to a halt in front of the open door to Ciel's room, eyes wide and slightly panicked. He'd felt X's emotional turmoil over their link and after what happened to Blues, the child came running.

Elec reached an arm to Rock, inviting him inside: everything was okay. The child relaxed slightly, but was still on edge. He took Elec's hand and blinked when an electromagnetic field blanketed him, his sensors fizzing for a moment before righting again. Following Elec's mental directions, Rock reached up to X, eyes widening when his hands didn't go through him.

X looked to Rock, trying to settle down, trying to quiet himself, and he pulled one hand away from Elec, reaching to Rock before falling to his knees as he embraced the younger Robot Master.

It'd been four long years reduced to this, so to be able to hold another, to _touch _another, again?

He reached across the link with Elec, fortifying it before flooding their connection with gratitude. Through Rock's, when he switched his focus a moment later, he pulsed love and relief, holding the robot tightly, feeling the slight tingle of the electromagnetic field against his own energy.

"Rock!" Alouette's voice called, the Reploid rushing into the room, worried that something had happened after Rock had rushed out of her room. Her eyes went wide when she saw X actually _hugging _Rock. "Mister X?" she asked, stepping forward.

"Alouette, give them a moment," Ciel called out, indicating for the young Reploid to stay where she was, though she was careful to keep her distance from the unit. That she felt the hairs on her neck standing up again was indication enough that most of the units in the base would want to avoid touching Elec, and by extension, Rock, at that moment.

"Mister Elec, how come Rock can touch Mister X?"

Rock blinked when X dropped to his knees and hugged Rock, but a big smile broke across his face and he hugged X back, nuzzling into the Cyber Elf's shoulder as Rock sent feelings of affection and love through their link. X was very, very happy now, almost overwhelmed by it, and it was making Rock happy in turn.

It took Elec a few moments to answer as he was a bit overwhelmed by X's immense gratitude at such a simple gesture. He wasn't used to this at all, but he kept his bewilderment from portraying on his face and turned to Alouette. He wasn't sure if she was insulated the way Rock was, so he didn't invite her to come any closer. The human, at least, had the good sense to keep her distance.

She probably shouldn't be in the same room if a Robot Master ever took command to direct dozens of units; the radio waves were potentially harmful.

Elec finally answered Alouette, though he was honestly paying more attention to X, sending across his link with the android that, really, it wasn't that big of a deal and he was glad it made X so happy. Not being able to touch was clearly having a negative impact on his psyche. "I've cloaked Rock in an electromagnetic field to repel X's. It's letting us interact with him."

Alouette looked and X and Rock for a long moment, as if amazed by X's sudden ability to interact with the Robot Master. "Could I hug him too?" she asked finally.

That actually made Elec hesitate. "Maybe later," he began, not wanting to disappoint her too badly, "but as it is right now, I'm not familiar enough with Reploids to safely enclose you in a field." Especially considering a mishap could_ wipe her memory databanks_. Or worse.

Alouette nodded softly, holding her doll close to her chest with both arms.

X's body slowly stopped shuddering and he fell silent, simply content for that fleeting moment to hold his brother close. Through his link with Elec, he tried to pass along just how much it meant, quickly sending a status report to Elec to let him _see_ just what it was doing to his systems, electromagnetic data though it all was.

Rock was still, too, just relaxing into X's embrace and enjoying it. He understood that Elec had to continuously create and sustain the field for them to be able to touch this way, but…

Elec always was considerate that way, prideful as he was.

Elec accepted the status report from X, a warm feeling resonating from the Robot Master's side, almost humming in agreeable satisfaction with X's current status. Yes, this was much closer to how it should be.

X was hesitant, almost unwilling, as he began to pull away from Rock. He didn't want to lose this, to be dragged back into being able to only touch along the network, through hacks, or through the emotional aspect of the link. He had others to consider, however, especially considering Elec and Ciel had a good deal of work ahead of them now that Elec was heading the project. '_Thank you,_' he whispered across the link to Elec, and he had to hold himself back from wiping at his face, trying to clean away unshed tears as he stood.

'_We can do this again,_' Elec reassured X, sending some comfort along their link once more as Rock straightened, blinking as Elec ceased the field, the strange static feeling in the room dissipating. The newbuilt turned and latched onto Elec now, gripping at his armor as queries and status reports were quickly exchanged. Rock's overall status was better now, too, and even though the child was still very upset over Blues, it seemed like playing with Alouette and then hugging X was enough to at least take his mind off things.

Ciel brushed a hand along the back of her head, smoothing out the hairs that Elec's power had started to frizz, and looked to the Robot Master. "Would you like to get started now, or is there something else that needs your attention?"

"We can start now," Elec said, looking to Ciel even as Rock latched onto him, bombarding him with queries and data, happy, chattery little feelings.

Alouette looked to Elec, then Ciel. "Sis, can Rock and I go play now or does he have to stay here?"

Ciel nodded. "It's probably best for him to stay since we need your help. Do you have your Elves with you?"

The Reploid nodded, reaching into her dress pocket and withdrawing a small cube-shaped object. "Who do you need?" she asked, already wirelessly keying in her access sequence.

The scientist fell silent for a moment before shrugging, "Parick, Biraero, and Lanite."

Alouette looked up. "All three, Sis?" Usually, Ciel only ever wanted one of the elves out for her work, but now? Three, and each from a different classification set?

Ciel nodded. "One at a time, but I want Elec to see each one interact with the Energen Crystals, let him see what they do so he has a better understanding of what we're trying to achieve."

Alouette nodded. "So, the Hacker first, right?" They interacted the most readily with the crystals, even though Nurse Elves were Ciel's preferred classification.

"Lanite is fine," Ciel said. "How are his energy levels, though? I don't remember the last time he recharged."

"He could use a few," Alouette answered as the Cyber Elf manifested from the cube, looking around before setting both his saber and dagger into the scabbards hanging from his hips.

He knocked the visor up with a thumb. "You summoned, milady?" he asked, turning to Alouette.

Alouette nodded, making a soft humming sound. "We need you to interface with an Energen Crystal, but I want to make sure your levels are stable."

Lanite nodded. "A few wouldst help," he said, "though thou needn't worry if another needs them more than I."

Elec's eyes widened when the Cyber Elf manifested, quickly registering it as a being similar in line to X, but still so _different_. And it was so _small_. And not even just in stature.

If not for the fact that this little one was clearly self-aware, Elec was certain his systems would have set its identification to a subservient, robot-type unit.

Rock's eyes were also round even as he clung to Elec's side as readily as he had Blues', both Robot Masters scanning Lanite intenseively.

"Sis will give you whatever you need," she said, motioning for the unit to get moving.

The elf fluttered its wings a bit before darting across the room, stopping gracefully on Ciel's shoulder. "Good t' see you again, Lady Ciel. Does the day find ye well?"

"Hopefully as good as it finds you," Ciel returned. "How many crystals do you need?"

Lanite was silent for a moment. "Five will suffice," he said.

Ciel frowned at the little elf for a moment. "Lanite, none of that chivalric 'the others need them more'. How many do _you_ need?"

The elf took a step back before nodding. "No offense meant, milady. And twelve shalt set mine systems to right."

Ciel set out a dozen of the crystals on a nearby shelf, turning to look at Alouette as Lanite began to absorb the crystals. "Alouette, how did he get low enough that he needs so many?"

"Sorry, Sis," Alouette said as she hugged her doll. "You know he doesn't like taking more than a few and I don't like being bossy with him."

Well, it'd already been outlined that these Cyber Elves consumed Energen Crystals in lieu of using batteries, and that made Elec wonder what kind of energy it was, exactly, and whether they could rig the Cyber Elves to something that could replenish their energy that wasn't so rare and difficult to come by. A renewable resource would be ideal.

And now that the Cyber Elf was consuming them, Elec's scans revealed that the being was, in fact, breaking the crystal down and actually _absorbing_ it.

It was times like these that Elec was honestly glad he could hold more than one train of thought; had he not, he was certain that he wouldn't have heard the next time he was spoken to.

"Are the other two that bad off?" X said, looking to Alouette.

"No, Mister X. Parick and Biraero would only need one or two just to compensate for what they'll use powering a crystal." She smiled softly before looking to Lanite. "Feeling better?"

"Verily," Lanite said, straightening up as he absorbed the last of the crystals. "Lady Ciel, thine orders?"

Ciel put another crystal near Lanite. "I need you to charge this one." She pointed to Elec. "He needs to observe how they work."

Lanite looked to Rock and Elec, his brows furrowing a bit beneath his helmet, and he fluttered over to the pair. "A thousand pardons, good lords, that I didst not acknowledge thine presence." He bowed deeply, though in a more European manner, as if bowing before members of the court. "Mine name is Lanite, as thou must have heard, and 'tis a pleasure to greet ye both." He stood, looking at Elec more directly this time. "Ye be unfamiliar units to mine eyes. Art thou new around the base?"

Elec blinked, but managed not to lose his composure, even as Rock continued to look to Lanite with wide, curious, excited eyes.

Elec had to take a moment to tell Rock no, he could _not_ have one.

"We're both new," Elec began, glancing to X. "My name is Elec, and this is Rock," and he placed a hand on the child's shoulder. "We're X's brothers."

"Ah, a pleasure and an honor to meet ye," Lanite said, "and with such a _legend_ for thine sibling." He blinked after a moment, as if collecting himself. "Here I am, prattling on like a barkeep serving rounds at a pub whilst there is work to be done. Art thou ready for me to begin, sir?" he asked.

"Lanite," X called out, waiting for the elf to look at him before continuing. "Legend though I may be to many, _they_ are legends to me. Can you see the similarities between Rock and me?"

"Aye," Lanite said, looking to Rock for a moment. "But legends to thee, Master X?"

"My _older_ brothers," X explained. "Rock is my direct progenitor model."

The Cyber Elf's eyes went wide as he turned to Elec and Rock. "Doubly an honor, then, to meet thee!" he cried. "Legends to a legend!" he said with a laugh. "Methinks thou needst to take thine city back more so now, Master X, and to resurrect the arts. A fine tale to be sung if thine elder brethren hast survived to this day."

"Perhaps there will be songs once the city is ours again," X answered, unable to keep the smile from his face, "but it's likely that there will be more reason to celebrate than just Zero and me finding lost siblings."

"There art brethren to Master Zero present?" The elf was astounded. "Shouldst I find myself still in claim of mine life at the end of these troubles, a bard I shalt make of myself!"

Rock's posture suddenly stiffened as he paused, frowning, "What do you mean, if you're still alive at the end?"

"Dost thou not know of the Cyber Elf fate shouldst we expend too much of our energy?"

X shook his head. "Lanite, wait." He looked to Rock. "If we encode programming into the type of crystals we have here, they grow into Cyber Elves like Lanite. As they grow, they turn their core crystal into energy, into the forms they take. Lanite is actually a second-tier Cyber Elf in that he matured into a larger form than he started with, but they all follow the same rules when it comes to their energy."

Ciel walked over to Rock, dropping a crystal into his hand. "If a Cyber Elf uses the energy they get from other crystals, they'll be okay and can absorb more to restore themselves. But if a Cyber Elf uses all of their energy, including what they had from their core crystal, they don't survive the process. The Resistance tries very hard to keep all our elves in the best condition, but…" She turned to X.

"Neo Arcadia has begun to see them as nothing more than tools," and he pushed an insane amount of comfort through their link, trying to reassure Rock that they would try as hard as they could to preserve the elves they had.

None of the three wanted to voice to the Robot Masters that some elves still saw their sacrifices as necessary, willingly given for the Resistance and their hope for the future.

Rock trembled over his link with X, over his link with Elec, and he turned to look at X with wide eyes, something like horror dawning on his face. "If that kills the Cyber Elves, then X, if you…" Rock broke off there and took a step back, unable to tear his gaze from X's translucent form.

If X ran out of energy here, then he'd _die_? Not shut down for recharge, but honestly die? Rock saw X's image fracture before and realized now that it was because X was running low, that it was getting hard for him to manifest. How many times had X tempted fate?

X actually panicked a little. He honestly hadn't expected anyone, _especially Rock_, to figure that detail out. He immediately flooded the link with Rock with reassurances, tried to comfort his brother. "In…in a way, that's true, but like I said before, I don't have crystal core and I don't necessarily need to manifest at the size I do. This is my natural height, the way I look in my physical form, but if the need arises…" X sighed.

Rock was still clinging to Elec like he was his last lifeline and the older unit was leaning down a bit now, an arm around Rock as he sent his own reassurances via link before sending to X, '_Show him what happens if the need arises, he's not going to calm down otherwise._' Blues taught Rock well enough not to take any claims at face value: there needed to be proof. Proof of good health, proof of skill, proof of competence. Things like that needed to be _demonstrated_, not claimed.

X's sigh morphed into a groan. _No one_ had ever seen X that way except for X himself.

But this was for Rock, and X was already far too aware of how troubled the young Robot Master was. Those emotions were rapid-firing across their link.

X closed his eyes, floating a bit higher as he let himself be engulfed in light as he started a manifestation change.

Ciel and Alouette both shielded their eyes, even as the orb of light grew smaller and smaller.

A moment later, X flew forward, his tiny ocean-blue wings fluttering as he moved to hover next to Lanite. His garments remained the same—the soft blue robes, the multi-colored halo, and the azure boots that covered his lower legs—but he was now surrounded by an opalescent orb of light that, while translucent, still shimmered with the same spectrum of color as his halo. '_This is what happens if I don't have the energy left to maintain a full manifestation,_' he said over the link, too embarrassed to actually speak aloud.

Rock reached out over their link, reached out to ask for status updates, to scan X, to figure out what he just _did_. That looked like _fun_. His body language relaxed considerably, though his mental status was still very stressed—even while playing with Alouette, there was that trill in his contribution to the Harmony, that shaky, lonely line that meant that all was not well. '_This form uses less energy?_' Rock asked, glancing between X and Elec.

X looked to Elec. '_Can you tell?_' he asked.

Elec was scanning X intently, evaluating him before sending to both Rock and X, '_He is using less energy, but more importantly, he's using it more efficiently in the smaller form. So not only does it use less because it's smaller, but it's using less because it does more with less_.' So yes, this form was more economical, though Elec could totally understand why X had been so reluctant to turn into it.

X fluttered over to Rock, smiling softly at his brother. '_So I do have a fallback if things get out of hand, and I know that if I end up having to take on this form, it's better for me to reenter Cyberspace then keep on with whatever I'm doing._'

Ciel smiled over at X. "I don't see what's wrong with that form," she said.

"I think it's cute!" Alouette added.

X shook his head. "It's not as convenient as you might think." The voice that spoke was X's, but far softer than he normally sounded.

Ciel's eyes widened a bit at the sound. "Then again, with your position as commander…"

X nodded before changing back to his normal form. "It may require daily returns to Cyberspace, but it's a lot more effective for me to be like this. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a few people I need to pay a visit to." And by a few, X meant Shadow and Zero. With a nod, he exited the room, smiling as he ran his hand over Rock's hair as he passed.

"Sir Elec, if it be thine wish, how shalt we continue?" Lanite looked excitedly to the Robot Master.

Rock was all affection toward X and he smiled as well, waving to X as he left the room.

Elec sent a feeling of farewell to X over their link, though they didn't close it down, before looking to Lanite and replying to the little Cyber Elf, "Why don't you show me your abilities?" He wanted to see what Lanite could do.


	27. Hide and Seek

_Sorry about the slightly late update. I went to a convention over the weekend and it broke my record of going a year and some change without getting sick. I've been rocking an amazing fever for the past day and a half, but I'm glad to say I'm feeling better. Con plague: get enough people in a convention center, and it just travels. _

_Anyway, I'll take this time to address some questions raised in the reviews. Starting with X calling Copy X a thing. That you, our readers, are sympathizing with the Copy means we're doing a good job of conveying the Copy's character and situation, but you have to consider this from X's point of view. He's unable to directly do anything in Neo Arcadia without his body, and there's this newbuilt running his city into the ground while wearing his face. This newbuilt is committing **genocide** against Reploidkind. Yes, he is young, and he certainly has no idea how to handle this power, but that does not excuse him from all the death, grief, and pain he is causing. Not knowing that something is wrong isn't much an excuse when faced with the consequences of thoughtless actions. And believe me, the Copy knows it's wrong._

_And as for why we have a Canard. It's unrealistic to think that everyone in the base (or any organization) would be completely okay with the status quo being so disrupted. We needed some voice of dissent because honestly, someone **would** be dissenting. Every group has a prick and Canard is ours. _

_So in this chapter, Phantom continues his training and he and Shadow get X a very thoughtful gift. Surprise presents are the best kind, wouldn't you say?_

_We don't own Mega Man or any related characters and we're still not making any money off this._

* * *

><p>It'd taken several days, but Phantom was starting to be able to actually keep up with Shadow. He hadn't brought the Reploid back into the dimension he could retreat into since the day he'd taken him to find out what X and Elec needed, if only because Phantom couldn't access it on his own and, really, he needed to train with his <em>own<em> skillsets, not use Shadow's as a crutch.

It wasn't even that Phantom was unskilled or inexperienced. Shadow realized rather quickly that the younger ninja was _complacent_. A complacent ninja was a _dead ninja_. The unit was beyond lucky that the Protocol only paralyzed him, only offlined him, and didn't do worse.

They'd all been beyond lucky that Zero hadn't been in his original body.

"You've improved," and by more than a little bit. Even if Phantom was only getting back into old habits, it was still a marked change and one that should be recognized.

"Domo arigatou gozaimashita, Shadow-sensei," Phantom said, bowing deeply to the elder ninja. It only took a half-second for him to notice that Shadow had moved, however, and Phantom quickly leapt backwards to avoid the katana strike aimed for his exposed neck. Moving across the room, he spun into an expert backflip, hands moving swiftly, and the Reploid landed silently a few feet away from Shadow, two shuriken caught tightly between the first and middle fingers of his hands.

Shadow didn't want this Reploid to disillusion himself to think that something as small as being willing to teach him meant that Shadow's loyalties couldn't change. There were very few that Shadow had been completely loyal to, and only one of them was in the base. "Now," Shadow said as the Shadow Blades dissipated from Phantom's hands, like darkness disappearing under a harsh light, "About the test you suggested."

Phantom nodded. "The question was raised before that, if I had a way, would I remove my siblings from Neo Arcadia. In a head-to-head fight, I can't handle my siblings that well, and for me to incapacitate them means causing more damage than I'm willing to inflict. However, you have abilities that can offline a unit without causing excessive damage to their physical or mental structure. I saw what you did with Master Zero after the incident in the lab. I can draw my eldest brother to us, make him get the power plant data, and do so without raising any alerts in the city. Even my own troops are not aware of all the ways I learned to navigate the networks…" Phantom stopped, falling silent for a moment, before looking to Shadow again. "Would I be able to either have your assistance or be provided equipment to use against Harpuia so that I could bring him here?"

Shadow hummed slightly, pondering Phantom even though he already had his reply. The Four Guardians functioned as military leaders and major morale points in Neo Arcadia. They had one, so to remove another and halve their power? And to possibly take the other two? Even if they refused to cooperate with the Resistance, there were ways to restrain units. The important part was that they'd either be on their side or _off the chessboard altogether_. And Shadow didn't think that was a bad offer, not one bit. "Just giving you some blades, some poisons, won't help you," especially not if the jammer needed to be retooled or adjusted on the spot, "but I think that moving into the city and incapacitating your brother should be easy enough for both of us."

"And it wouldn't be against your orders from Uncle Blues to…your orders from Proto Man to leave the base?" Phantom had to catch himself. If he was going to remain under Shadow's tutelage, that meant viewing him not only as a mentor but also as a superior officer. "I don't want to be the cause of any issues here, Shadow-sensei."

Okay, now Shadow looked _amused_, as though Phantom said something really funny because he just _didn't get it_. "It would be correct for you to call him Blues, as you are a part of the Light family line." So Phantom didn't have to fret about that, "And I can come and go as I please; Rock is the one that may not leave the base."

"Hirondelle has been setting up plans for a raid on the industrial district for the last few days, plotting out strike points and how we're going to get in and out without being noticed. They want me in as a scout and lead unit, but with you there…" Phantom blinked. "I'm probably going to find out then how much my own hacking skills pale in comparison."

"Their plans won't be necessary," Shadow said, moving over to Phantom and grabbing him by one arm, his movements purposely open to show this really wasn't a sneak attack, then pulled the Reploid into shadow space along with him, "I have the maps and coordinates. We're grabbing your brother last; stay cloaked."

Phantom followed close behind, already setting his alternate access codes to hide the moment he linked into the Neo Arcadian network. Quickly referencing a few of his own databanks, he nodded to himself and continued moving with Shadow towards their target somewhere within the all-encompassing darkness they were enshrouded by.

Shadow kept very close attention to Phantom, testing how quickly the Reploid could reasonably move here when he was essentially blind. He'd carried Rock in and out, so he hadn't had to navigate anything on his own, but the little one hadn't liked the dark at all. It wasn't even that he was afraid of the darkness; it was that a unit that qualified as the equivalent of close, vital family was under attack, was nearly killed, and Rock had to sit alone in the dark, even though he was scared out of his mind.

Really, that hadn't helped the child's emotional state any, but the alternative was letting him potentially be found and killed. Unacceptable.

Phantom's optics had compensated for the lack of light the moment Shadow had drawn him into the ebon darkness, and he remained silent for a long while, content to follow the ninja as it seemed as if at least he knew where he was going.

When Phantom finally spoke up again, his voice was a low whisper and not at all the sound that normally came from the Reploid when he spoke. "Does this dimension exist parallel to our own? Neo Arcadia's a good four day's walk if that's the case." The Resistance would realize they'd gone missing.

Well, they'd notice that _Phantom_ had gone missing, at any rate.

Shadow actually paused at the sound of Phantom's voice. Had he less discipline, he'd have stopped altogether. "Why did you alter your voice print?"

"Helps when I'm piggybacking a signal on the network, passing as another unit. It's how I'm going to get Harpuia to get the power plant coding before we grab him." Phantom kept his voice low; at that moment, he really wished he had a system similar to what Blues had given X. The link would have proven useful for this kind of work.

Shadow nodded: that made sense. "As to this dimension's location: it is parallel, yet it isn't." _He_ could move anywhere instantly here. Other units, though? The travel time was still significantly cut down, but it wasn't as fast as teleportation. Which is why they were walking. "It'll take another…half hour at the speed we're going." Which wasn't a long walk at all.

Phantom figured that he'd be back on the city network within twenty minutes, possibly more, depending on how close they passed to the relay towers near the Eden Dome. "I'll let you know when I'm able to link into the net," Phantom said. "From there, we can run silent, since we're both able to cloak," Shadow perhaps more effectively than him.

Shadow nodded, though he estimated that he'd be able to slip onto the Neo Arcadian network at roughly the same time. He'd have to take special care to remain fully cloaked. Proto Man hadn't said much about his brief stint in Neo Arcadia, but his feeling over the Harmony spoke volumes of the place and his experiences there.

If what Proto Man thought was accurate, then Shadow was going to be very underwhelmed with the security there.

"So where to first?" Phantom asked after a few moments of empty silence, careful to remain only a few steps behind Shadow as they continued to move. "Manufacturing district? And do you even have a list of parts for what we need?" Phantom remembered that Hirondelle said he'd put one together, but the Reploid hadn't thought ahead enough to have grabbed a copy.

"…You should really bring everything with yourself," Shadow replied; suppose they became separated, or something else happened? What if it became up to Phantom to get the parts on his own? Where would he be then? "But I do have the list, yes."

"I kind of thought that you'd have a more comprehensive list than Hirondelle, seeing as you may have a list of what Uncle Blues needs for repairs." He'd seen the elder Robot Master's left arm after the incident in the lab, knew they were going to need parts—perhaps even custom ones—to get that limb back in working order. "But I will remember for next time, Shadow-sensei. I apologize if I disappointed you."

"It takes time to break out of a set way of thinking," Shadow replied; it was training for Phantom's mind just as much as his body. His reflexes. "Consider this an extension of my teaching if it helps." Shadow did have a much better idea of exactly _what_ was wrong with Blues' shoulder and arm, but he had little doubt that the parts could be procured one way or another.

Phantom nodded, lapsing into silence once more.

The quiet was nearly unbearable, almost palpable, the two having continued on without speaking for a while, before Phantom realized what the soft tickle in his mind was. "Shadow-sensei, I've got a connection point for the city network." And at that, he cloaked his access and logged in, waiting for Shadow to provide a secure private chat for them.

Shadow also accessed the network, quickly spanning over it while cloaking his presence. It was easy, easier than the Resistance base, if that was even possible. The Wilybot cordoned off a section of the network as an extra layer of protection, then pulled Phantom into it to allow for communications. '_We'll head to the manufacturing district first,_' Shadow told him, '_let's move quickly._' Shadow was willing to bet that they'd stepped up their security after Blues, but they wouldn't be expecting _anything_ like this.

Well, they ought to know how utterly defenseless they were, how futile their protections were.

Shadow and Phantom moved in unison, arms tucking against their sides as they sprinted across the nondescript expanse, Phantom trailing behind his mentor and keeping a close eye on his movements to make sure that he didn't run into the elder ninja. '_What kind of time frame are we looking at, Shadow-sensei?_' Phantom asked across the link. Blues had been in and out of the city in less than two hours, from what he remembered of his uncle's supply raid.

'_Two hours or so, provided we don't have any mishaps,_' and Shadow didn't think they would, '_And most of that time will be getting the parts assembled, though the mechaniloids in the plant will do all of that for us._' Actually, '_It'd be easiest to assign them to assemble the order, get the plans and your brother, then pick the parts up on the way out._'

Phantom was already scanning the net for his target, picking across the access signals and smirking a bit when he found who he was looking for. Hacking into the broadcast controls, Phantom piggybacked on Herculious' signal, bouncing a private communications link request to Harpuia from there, setting his systems to intercept any and all transmissions aimed for the Rekku lieutenant originating from his brother's signal.

Harpuia frowned a bit at the request, shrugging as he verified the link. '_I thought you were off-duty today,_' Harpuia said, soaring past Neo Arcadia Tower as he soared towards his patrol zone.

Phantom swore to himself before returning with, '_I am, for the most part, General. Just got a private message from Judge Foxtar. Seems he wants me to head over to the main power station and get a new copy of the system coding._'

Harpuia smirked. '_Just like Foxtar to try and figure out what's wrong with the system even though we've tried a hundred different things to fix it. He say why he wanted the coding now, of all times?_'

'_Something about the task force lookin' over it,_' and there was a hesitation in the voice. '_Sorry, General, I didn't mean to bring up—_'

'_No worries,_' Harpuia answered, though his demeanor had changed a bit at the mention of the task force. '_As long as I don't see my brother again, I don't have to carry out that order. Father was generous enough to give me that reprieve._'

Phantom's heart tightened at the thought that Harpuia was still mistaking that thing for their father, that he was so bothered by the retirement order that he'd tried to find a way to get around it. '_Kinda put a rush on the code, though. Foxtar seemed like he wanted it six hours ago._'

'_I'm headed there now. Make sure to deploy a Pantheon squad; I'm supposed to be on patrol now._'

'_Just send your patrol coordinates, General, and I'll get it taken care of._'

Harpuia made a note of the patrol sector he'd been assigned, sending the message over to Herculious before darting down, weaving between the buildings and then dropping to one of the access passages to Sub Arcadia. With a heavy sigh, he dropped into the underbelly of the city, heading for the main section of the power plant.

Phantom nodded as he and Shadow continued to dart through the darkness, switching his piggyback over to Judge Foxtar's signal. '_My brother is heading to the power plant as we speak, Shadow-sensei,_' he passed along their link.

'_I heard,_' Shadow hummed even as they arrived at the warehouse. He'd checked ahead of time to find one that wouldn't be manned by humans or Reploids and, much like Blues, he took control over the mechaniloids in the facility and fed them his list. And they got right on it. '_My, these are efficient little ones,_' and there was nothing but approval in Shadow's voice, '_The parts will be ready in a half-hour's time._'

Phantom and Shadow had started heading for the manufacturing plant where the mechaniloids were packing their supplies into a box when the communications line between Harpuia and Foxtar came to life, and Phantom expertly caught the link, his vocal processor quickly recoding as he focused on the new mimic. '_Good afternoon, Guardian,_' he greeted across their link, '_though I am surprised to hear from you. Has something come up?_'

'_Herculious requested that I get the power plant coding for you,_' Harpuia replied, sending a file transfer request across the link.

Phantom accepted the file after a moment, verifying that his link with Harpuia was displaying as Foxtar's and not his own cloaked signal. '_Thank you, Sage Harpuia,_' Phantom said, '_and I hope that the next time one of us sends your lieutenant on an errand, he actually takes care to do it himself._'

The Judges' tone was biting, but Harpuia returned, '_In his defense, Herculious is off-duty today, but I will let him know._'

'_Take care, then,_' Phantom returned before severing the connection.

'_Alright,_' Shadow said, '_Where did you pick for the altercation?_'

Phantom quickly sent a file transfer request to Shadow. '_The map is for the area beneath Sub Arcadia. There are few cameras down there and no patrols…and Harpuia and I used to play down there when we were younger. The red dot is where we need to go._'

'_And now, there will be no cameras down there,_' Shadow said, moving down toward Sub Arcadia once he received and looked over the file transfer. After a moment, he had the exact location and the two of them were in one of the darker shadows in the corner, Shadow looking out into the area to ensure it was clear. '_Ready?_'

'_As ready as I'm going to be,_' Phantom answered, drawing a pair of kunai as he dropped down into the hallway. Turning, he looked to a darkened part of the ceiling a good distance away from any nearby light sources, weak though they were. '_Shadow-sensei, I won't end up throwing something into your dimension if I hit a random shadow, will I?_'

'_Of course not,_' was Shadow's reply; it'd just bounce off the surface as it would without a shadow. It wasn't an open door, after all.

Both kunai were thrown into the shadow, into the access passage there, sinking deeply into the stone, and Phantom leapt up, grabbing the handles tightly as he inverted himself against the passage. Despite the ease he'd have with dropping from Shadow's dimension, it would be something more common to Harpuia if he dropped from the ceiling instead of out of it—even if he was actually dropping out of a hole in it like this.

Keeping his signal cloaked, Phantom reached for his brother, verified and forced the link when he discovered that Harpuia hadn't blocked the contact. '_So,_' he teased, laughing a bit over the link, '_you kept the auto-link even with me marked for death? A bit ideological of you, isn't it?_'

Harpuia actually faltered in his flight path, stopping just short of running into a building in his shock, and he fired back along the link, '_Phantom…Phantom, get out of the city! There's an Order of Retirement out against you!_' And Harpuia did not want to be the unit responsible for taking Phantom out.

Phantom laughed again, a sick cackle, '_That order…such a thing of beauty, such wonderful work to get it passed, don't you think?_' He knew Harpuia would read his statement the wrong way, wanted him to misunderstand.

'_Phantom…_' Harpuia's voice fractured across the link, and he shook his head, refusing to believe what he'd just heard, '_Phantom…you…you _can't_ be serious! You retired…Phantom, get out of the city __**now**__!_'

'_I think not, brother,_' Phantom retorted. '_You see…I don't want to leave because I want to play again. Like when we were kids. I want to play hide and seek._' And the ninja's voice took on a happy, lilting, sing-song tone. '_Come on, Harpy, come find me,_' he sang out. '_Come find me, if you can._'

Harpuia hung in the air for a long moment, staring at the city that sprawled below him, feeling sick for a moment. His brother…his _baby brother_ was back in Neo Arcadia…and had admitted that the Maverick charges leveled against him were _valid_. He stopped short of connecting to either Leviathan or Fefnir, hoping that, as he played Phantom's game, as he searched for the youngest of the AXR models, that he could convince Phantom to _leave_.

'_Phantom,_' Harpuia cried as he dove for the access tunnels back into Sub Arcadia, '_Phantom, please, little brother, listen to me. Leave. Leave the city and don't come back. Father won't enforce the order if you're not in the city proper. He won't make us follow you. He won't make us hunt you,_' and Harpuia misaimed his landing, coming down in an undignified and tumbling heap, distracted as he was by his pleas to his brother. '_Please, Phantom, I'm _begging you_! Get out of Neo Arcadia before I have to kill you!_'

'_Come find me, Harpy, like you used to when we were kids. Remind me of the days before the Maverick scourge. Remind me of the innocence we once had. Remind me of the days when this city was still pure._' Phantom was egging the unit on, hearing it clearly in his voice how broken Harpuia was, and for a moment, he hesitated.

Throughout their early years, Phantom and Harpuia had been the pranksters, the jokers, the wild ones that X couldn't tame but never cared to reprimand because they never harmed anyone, because they were always playing games and jokes in jest. To sully that memory with this? Phantom shook his head; Harpuia had to believe he was facing a Maverick shell of his sibling.

'_Do you think you can find me, Harpy? You had such a hard time when we were young…_'

Harpuia closed his eyes, resting his head against the cover to the access tunnel, knowing, remembering the pathways beneath the city, the shadowed world beneath Sub Arcadia where Phantom would always drag him to play. The wing crests on his helmet pulled down and tight against his head, and a mournful whine escaped him as he pushed the panel open, dropping down to the labyrinth below. '_Please, Phantom,_' and his voice was shattering, '_listen to me! Get out of here! Don't make me do this! Don't force me to carry out this order!_'

'_Why are you so afraid to find me?_' Phantom teased. '_But you're not deep enough, not lost enough to the shadows._'

Harpuia shuddered at the realization that Phantom was tracking him, and he quickly cloaked his signal on the net.

'_I can still follow you,_' the voice sang in his ears, in his head. '_Or did you forget I taught you how to do that?_'

Moving for another tunnel, Harpuia let himself drop down, hovering for a moment before letting his feet hit the ground. '_I didn't forget, Phantom. I would never forget…won't forget you._'

'_Aww, why so sad? Games are supposed to be fun, Harpy. Games should make you laugh,_' and if to emphasize his point, Phantom chuckled across their link. '_Come on, brother, deeper into the maze. You know I never wanted to be easy to find, that I wanted it to be a challenge. This is fun,_' and he laughed again. '_Come find me,_' he sung again, extending the last word into a tremulous trill.

Deeper and deeper Harpuia went, moving from tunnel to tunnel, drawing further away from the city as he moved. Pleas and screams were fired across the link with each step, begging, ordering, screaming, crying for Phantom to leave, to get out, to just _go away and never come home again_. Each, in turn, was answered with another laugh, another taunt, another soft chant of '_come find me_' that made Harpuia want to stop and turn around.

It had taken nearly half an hour before the link quieted between them, and Harpuia reached out along the link, reached out for his brother, and felt no answer. Had Phantom finally left?

'_I see you,_' Phantom chimed across the link after a moment.

Harpuia spun around, eyes trying to pierce the darkness of the corridor he was in. "Phantom, please, don't make me do this! I don't want to have to carry out this retirement order! Don't…don't…don't make me do this. I don't want to have to do this to you."

'_You act as if you could actually bring yourself to bear arms against me, Harpuia,_' Phantom replied. '_This is my element, brother, my place._'

Letting go of his kunai, Phantom dropped soundlessly to the floor behind Harpuia. "Found me," he hissed in a low whisper.

Harpuia wheeled around, hands hovering over his sabers as the Guardian tried to keep himself from activating his battle protocols. "Phantom…" he whimpered, and nearby, one of the overhead lights popped, shedding its pale, sallow light across them both for just a moment before it died, darkness enveloping them again.

The eyes that had stared at him from beneath Phantom's helmet were blood red.

"_Phantom…_"

"Sayonara, nii-san," Phantom said, glaring at the Guardian, the malice clear in his voice.

In that instant, a new unit materialized behind Harpuia out of nowhere, but the Guardian didn't even have time for his eyes to widen in horror. The shine of a blade flickered behind him, and with a quick swipe, his systems were jammed, the power was cut, and Sage Harpuia was offline. Shadow reached forward, catching the considerably lighter Reploid before he could crumple completely to the floor. "He'll stay this way for four hours," unless the antidote was administered, of course.

Phantom nodded. "More than enough time to get our things and get back to base. Do you want me to carry him or the supplies from the warehouse?"

"You take him. I'll bring those mock-ups here for you, it'll be quicker that way. Finish with that, then we'll leave." Shadow handed Harpuia off to Phantom, then, after a moment's hesitation, flickered from view.

He reappeared about half a minute later, from a different shadow, holding sabers identical to Harpuia's in one arm.

He was honestly impressed. This plan was absolutely diabolical.

Handing Harpuia back to Shadow, Phantom took the sabers, running his hands along the cool metal for a moment before tossing both saber mock-ups into the air, jumping back and throwing a pair of kunai, the sabers pierced and pinned to the wall. Moving closer, he nodded, both of the kunai having torn right through the battery cells, the ambient electrical discharge surely melting the internal components of the sabers. Moving back to Shadow, Phantom wordlessly lifted his brother's limp body onto his shoulders. '_Let's go,_' he said over the link.

Shadow grabbed Phantom and pulled him and Harpuia alike back into the shadow space, pausing only to be certain Phantom was oriented well enough to follow before moving back toward the manufacturing district. Their order was ready. Shadow barely had to step from the shadows to pick up the box, hefting it easily as he sent feelings of approval to the units that did his bidding. He'd be reluctant to leave them here, loyal as they were, if not for the fact that, well, Neo Arcadia would be theirs in time, anyway. They just had to bide their time.

The run back to the Resistance base took just as long, but it still managed to feel much shorter.

'_Shadow, it's possible to leave Harpuia here as you did with Uncle Rock, right?_' Phantom asked, looking at the ninja.

'_Yes, provided it's not too long._' He didn't want Harpuia potentially waking up alone here and wandering off.

'_Not long at all. I just need to find my father and get him to Cerveau's lab._' Once Shadow provided him with an exit point, Phantom set Harpuia down on the 'floor' before stepping through the shadow and moving toward X's room. Knocking lightly, he called out, "Father?"

The door swung open a moment later and, were it not for the fact that Phantom knew he couldn't interface with the charger pod, X looked as if he'd plugged into the pod and left the lid open. "Hirondelle was looking for you earlier. Told him you might have been out training with Shadow."

"I was," Phantom replied, smirking. "Shadow-sensei is providing me with a lot of lessons to improve my skills, though I'm certain being on par with him will be a challenge I'm not so sure I can accomplish."

"Don't push yourself too hard. Reploids weren't built like the Robot Masters."

"I know, Father. It's simply a matter of proving myself to him and then realizing that I want to prove myself by emulating his skills." Phantom laughed softly. "However, Cerveau did tell me that he wanted to speak with you, though he didn't say as to why."

It took every ounce of self-control for Phantom not to crack a smile.

X nodded. "I'll be on my way, then," he said, floating from the pod. "Are you coming with me?"

"If you want the company," the ninja replied.

The two moved quickly through the halls, moving up for the fourth level, Phantom trailing just behind X as they stepped into the lab where Cerveau was currently busying himself working on another weapon.

X remained silent, recognizing the weapon design as Zero's war fans. Waiting a moment to let the nostalgia pass, he looked to the medic. "You called for me?"

Cerveau startled and looked up, thoroughly confused, but before he had a chance to ask X what he was talking about, Shadow materialized near one of the exam tables, neatly placing a _large_ box emblazoned with the emblem from Neo Arcadia's manufacturing district. It was easily three times the size of the box that was still sitting surreptitiously beneath Blues' bed. "We've collected the supplies that were entailed," Shadow said, even as he turned to the exam table behind it and clearing it off of the few parts that were still scattered over its surface, the remnants of one of Cerveau's completed projects. "And we've secured full plans and logs for the power plant in Neo Arcadia," so they didn't need to know about that.

Really, why plan such an elaborate raid when one or two units could do the job, and a bit extra?

Well, to X, this would be a _lot_ extra.

"And we collected one other thing," Shadow said, looking up to the ceiling as the prone form of Sage Harpuia dropped from the shadows and onto the exam table the Robot Master was standing at. Shadow took a moment to straighten the Reploid into a more dignified position before looking back to X, "I hope you don't mind."

X had jumped back a bit as his eldest son's body dropped to the table, eyes widening at first in horror, then in surprise. _This_ was what Phantom had considered training?

Phantom had moved past his father quickly, hands dancing over the releases for Harpuia's armor, looking to Cerveau for a moment as he pulled one of his brother's gauntlets from his arm. "Cerveau, could you grab an empty cart? I want to leave his armor with you for maintenance, if that's alright by you. You did a better job with mine than half the tech crews in Neo Arcadia," and Harpuia, for all his honor and importance as both General and the eldest son of Master X, wasn't really keen on keeping his armor in pristine condition. Clean and operational, yes, but past that? "Shadow-sensei, could you grab a set of table restraints? I don't want him decking me when he wakes up," even though Phantom had already set his eyes back to their original color.

"We still have three hours or so," Shadow said, but he moved ahead to grab the table restraints, not even needing to ask Cerveau where they were located, disturbingly enough.

Cerveau wordlessly brought an empty cart and began loading Harpuia's armor as it came off the Guardian, glancing more than once at X, who was still staring, dumbstruck. Hell, _Cerveau_ wasn't even certain what to say. No one had been expecting something like this, and it was such a _success_. "I'll begin on his armor once…once we can be certain that Guardian Harpuia checks out well." Patients first, armor and armaments later.

"Was figuring you'd reactivate him as soon as Cerveau gave the all-clear," Phantom said, securing Harpuia to the table as soon as he'd pulled the last of his brother's armor off. Grabbing the sabers that hung from sheaths on his hip armor, Phantom quickly checked that the casing hadn't cracked when the Guardian had impacted against the table. "Father…" Phantom said, finally turning to the Cyber Elf.

X was _still_ staring at his youngest son, watching as Phantom went about removing Harpuia's armor from his elder brother as if it were just another day at the base and that he and Shadow hadn't just _kidnapped_ one of his kids from the city. Finally, "Are you _nuts_?"

Phantom shrugged. "Probably a little bit," he admitted. "You think this is bad, you should see what I did in the city. Copy X isn't going to have a choice but to validate my retirement order now."

"He…wait…what…why?"

"Because the traces I left of my presence in the city?" Phantom grinned, that age-old smirk he wore after pulling off an elaborate prank back when he was still a newbuilt. "They're going to think I killed him."

X didn't know whether he wanted to laugh, cry, try to hug Phantom, Hack him in place of being able to hit him, or facepalm. In the end, though, he chose simply to sigh. "How in _blazes_ did you two manage this?"

"Easy enough to hack the city networks, Shadow-sensei's a better cloaker and hacker than I am, so getting parts wasn't a problem, and Harpy wasn't able to turn down a game of hide and seek with his Maverick baby brother." He blinked for a moment, "Though I was surprised to hear that Copy X was actually gracious enough to allow Harpuia and Fefnir the ability to overlook my Order of Retirement as long as I wasn't in the city."

X grimaced. The thought was comforting to an extent—it meant the copy still had something akin to compassion in his programming code—but, "That probably didn't extend to your sister."

"Probably not, but that's likely going to be the only problem we run into when we go for her."

X balked at that, seeing a similar expression of surprise on Cerveau's face.

"What?" Phantom said, shrugging. "Your own Resistance members asked if I'd remove my siblings from that city if I had a way. Shadow-sensei has provided me the means to do so. How could you assume I'd leave them when I have the chance to bring them here, to make sure they're safe, and to make sure they know _you're still alive_?"

Cerveau believed that Harpuia wouldn't have a problem with siding with the Resistance, especially given that Phantom wasn't Maverick and his father was here and not in Neo Arcadia, but he couldn't help grimly thinking that if, for some reason, Sage Harpuia felt that he needed to remain sided with Neo Arcadia, they'd have to keep him detained and restrained at all times and on a far more permanent basis than Phantom ever was.

The check-up didn't take very long; Harpuia wasn't injured at all. Some of his parts were a little more worn than ideal, but given the situation in Neo Arcadia…at least nothing was so glaring as that one programmer whose limb had to be completely replaced. No, a supplement would be more than enough to satisfy Harpuia's systems. "He's in good condition."

Phantom snorted a little, trying to hold back his laughter, as he jumped onto the exam table nearest Harpuia's prone form. "I'm tempted to keep this little joke running a moment longer," he said to Shadow, his eyes quickly morphing from black to red in plain sight of the units in the room.

Shadow shook his head, bemused, but not discouraging Phantoms' fun, "You're going to give him a heart attack if you keep on like that."

) "You actually _confronted him_ with…" X did facepalm this time. "Thirty-seven years operational and you're _still_ the biggest prankster of the family."

Phantom nodded. "Life's more fun that way," he replied. "Now, Father, if you would be so kind as to get out of Harpy's line of sight before Shadow-sensei wakes him?" The smile on his face was absolutely devious, and he laughed a bit.

X sighed, shaking his head as his halo shifted to green for a moment before the elf shimmered from sight.

Now that Shadow thought about it, his own red eyes would be less than reassuring to the unconscious Reploid, wouldn't they? Shadow double-checked Harpuia's status before drawing a new Shadow Blade, running a finger along one of the edges before quickly swiping the Reploid's throat with it, backing off immediately as the blade dissolved in his hand. Harpuia would need a moment to orient himself before this mischief continued.

Harpuia groaned as his systems came back online, and he groggily set himself to quick scan to verify that all of his systems were still in line. The moment he realized that his armor wasn't registering, however, he tried to sit up, held down tight against…

Where _was_ he?

"Wakey-wakey, big brother," Phantom called from the table he was crouched on, carmine eyes staring at Harpuia. "Time to rejoin the world of the living."

"It's not living if you're not yourself," Harpuia replied, though his voice was weak.

"Come now, Harpy, aren't you happy to see me? I'm still alive, aren't I? Why aren't you happy to see your baby brother?" Eyes drifted up and away, as if looking to another in the room.

Harpuia's systems ran cold when he turned and saw another crimson-eyed unit hovering nearby, the eyes the only thing he could see because of the face mask hiding everything below those soulless orbs.

Phantom leapt across the gap between their tables, crouching low near Harpuia. "I'm happy to see _you_, Harpy." Phantom blinked then, the red bleeding from his eyes as he looked at his brother. "And welcome to Father's Resistance."

"Father's…Father is back in—"

"I'm right here," X said, coming back into visibility as he approached the table, waving at Phantom to get off. "Enough with the pranks, Phantom, Harpuia doesn't need any more of an upset than what you already gave him."

Phantom rolled his eyes as he flipped off the table, coming down at Harpuia's side. "Sorry for the prank, Harpy," he apologized. "I couldn't pass up the opportunity."

"But…you…the order…how?"

X ran a hand over Harpuia's hair, the electric tingle fluffing a few of the brunet hairs. "We'll get you acclimated here as soon as you run a full systems scan and make sure that you're alright. Cerveau," and X motioned to the medic, "already checked you over physically, but I want to make sure that you're okay here," and he tapped a thumb against the Guardian's head.

"Father…" Harpuia said, confused about the tingle running across his head, "what happened to you? And…and…if you're here, then who is that…?"

"Run the scan, Harpy," Phantom said, nodding. "We'll fill you in from there."

* * *

><p>They'd finished showing the Cyber Elf abilities to Elec and explaining exactly what these little units were a while ago and now he was running tests on the crystals. He'd brought up all of the literature they already had on the substance and was now running comparative notes, testing the makeup and possible origin of the little crystalline stones.<p>

It'd taken about ten minutes for Elec to remember that as a newbuilt, Rock needed to be entertained. Constantly. The child decided that he wanted to 'help' Elec with his research and the 'help' quickly degraded into 'play with Alouette and the Cyber Elves in the lab. Noisily.' Elec wasn't one to scold, so instead he had Rock come back over to him and gave him a list of objectives to fulfill regarding the research. Rock was more than happy to do that.

Nothing changed for the next couple hours: the comm network was relatively quiet, Shadow was off somewhere, and Blues was running maintenance unhindered.

At least, unhindered until a defense protocol activated, overriding Elec's order to sleep and do maintenance. The Robot Master actually froze in what he was doing as his processor power was suddenly occupied with convincing Blues' that no, really, resting and running maintenance is in his best interest. So go back offline, nice little protocol and _oh hell_, what was even activating this? It took Elec a few moments to open a link with Shadow, trusting the Wilybot would have a more comprehensive idea of what happened since Blues reactivated and _why_ he was subconsciously freaking out over it.

Oh, _hell_. In a stream of light, Elec abruptly teleported out of Ciel's lab, leaving Rock to explain what happened.

He had to physically link back into Blues to ensure that the defense array would remain offline. He had to provide a point-by-point argument against it, backed by proof. It was like interfacing with Blues required an academic essay every time, not that that was a problem to the Robot Masters. It took almost five minutes, but Elec managed to calm Blues down to the state he was in before this other Guardian—another nephew—was brought here and brought online.

Elec straightened, taking a moment to sigh to himself before verifying the coordinates with Shadow to teleport into Cerveau's lab. He sent Rock an order to come down immediately as well, though Elec wanted to get there before Rock did, in case something wasn't right.

X and Phantom both turned when a stream of light formed out of nowhere, Harpuia doing the same, his eyes widening when another unit appeared from the light.

And not any unit the Guardian could recognize. Harpuia shrunk a little against the table he was secured to when he realized that this new unit was the tallest person in the room.

Phantom smiled at Harpuia, resting a hand against his shoulder and squeezing it, trying to reassure him. "Harpy, this is our Uncle Elec. It's one of Father's elder brothers."

"One of…" Harpuia's wide eyes were filling with some mixture of apprehension and amazement. "Wait…the progenitors…"

"Our uncles as well, and safe here," Phantom said, smiling. "Though Shadow-sensei," and he motioned to the ninja, "is a brother of Master Zero's."

Were it not for the restraints, Harpuia would have shot up from where he was laying. Instead, he turned to X. "_You found Master Zero?_"

X nodded. "We did," and he was smiling as well. "Though it may be a few days before you and he will have a chance to meet." X stepped aside to allow Elec to approach. "Where's Rock?"

Elec took a moment to evaluate Harpuia before tilting his head toward X as he answered, "He's on his way up. This one's arrival…woke up some defense protocols; I had to counter them to prevent him from forcing himself awake." Elec honestly didn't know which would be worse: Blues waking after an unwilling maintenance cycle or Blues waking after an unwilling, _half-completed_ maintenance cycle.

What Elec didn't voice was that he also came up before Rock to be sure it wasn't a hostile situation, even if Shadow didn't seem too worried.

Rock came in almost immediately after Elec finished speaking, having run down the hall very audibly. He stopped short, hesitated, when he saw the strange unit strapped down to the examination table, then skirted to Elec's side, looping his arms around one of Elec's as Rock glanced around, confused. He queried Elec and Shadow, and both responded immediately that the new unit was one of X's other children. Another nephew? But he was restrained…was that because he was mad at them?

Harpuia had actually cried out when Rock came into the room. _This unit_ he recognized.

Phantom leaned over, undoing the restraint holding Harpuia's arms. "Our Uncle Rock," Phantom said, "and we were sort of right. He's Father's direct progenitor model."

Harpuia reached out for Rock, a smile on his face. "Uncle Rock…it's…it's good to meet you."

Phantom poked Shadow on the network, their connection still active on the base's net. '_Would it be okay to take all the restraints off? He's not going to hurt anyone now that he knows what's going on._'

Shadow gave off a feeling like a shrug, '_That's fine,_' and it wasn't like Harpuia could actually _hurt_ Rock, not with his weapons and armors removed. Not with Rock having his own buster and Shadow and Elec standing _right there_.

Anyone that stupid deserved to have Blues wake up just to greet them.

Rock let go of Elec's arm, hesitated only a moment, then moved over to Harpuia, emboldened by Elec's reassurances. Rock reached up to Harpuia, half-bound though he was on the exam table, to say hello. "It's good to meet you, too," the child said, blinking when he realized he had no idea what this unit's designation was.

Phantom leaned over, disengaging the other two restraints before helping Harpuia to sit up.

"The other progenitor?" Harpuia asked, having heard Elec mention something about a unit forcing themselves awake because of…defensive protocols?

Phantom nodded. "Uncle Blues. He's down for maintenance at the moment, so you're not going to be meeting him either."

"Harpuia," X asked, "did your scans return clean?"

The Guardian nodded. "They did, Father," and he pushed himself from the table, opening his arms for Rock, signaling that he wanted a hug.

Rock smiled, going up on tiptoe, almost bouncing in place as he hugged Harpuia, already setting this unit's name and other data in his memory banks.

"He won't be awake for a while," and by a while, Elec meant almost another three days, "but when he does wake, don't take his overall…demeanor too personally. He won't be happy that he was offline for so long, doubly so given the condition of his arm and shoulder, so he'll be a bit coarse with everyone," especially Elec and Shadow, but never Rock. "It doesn't mean he doesn't like you, it's just how he is." Getting Blues to be more than cordial was what took _work_.

"He's not still in maintenance because of the escape from the city, is he?"

Phantom shook his head, and there was something in his expression that told Harpuia to drop it. "It's…unrelated." Reaching back, he pressed the release for his helmet, pulling the armor off and setting in on the table that Harpuia had been on a moment before, leaning down and hugging Rock and Harpuia both.

Rock reached up to Harpuia, or was until Phantom hugged them both, the child becoming still, snuggling them, before asking Harpuia, "You're one of the AXR line like Phantom, right? What's your number?"

Harpuia looked at his uncle, finally noticing the way that he was acting, noticing that, for being as old as this unit had to be to predate X…he was acting like a child, like they had been shortly after activation. A newbuilt? But how was that possible if this was the unit their father was based off of?

"My designation is AXR-001, Sage Harpuia," he answered, leaning into Phantom and hugging his brother for a moment. "And you?"

Rock smiled, "DLN-001, Rock. We're the same, though!" Both 001 units!

Harpuia couldn't help but laugh at Rock's comment. "I guess we are," he said, looking up to Elec. "You're Elec," he said, verifying the name as he offered his hand. "An honor."

Elec smirked, shaking Harpuia's offered hand, "I'm glad to see they were able to extract you. I'm DLN-008, Elec Man." The last of the original run of the First Numbers, though Time Man and Oil Man were produced shortly after, before the second war, so they were still older than the Second Numbers.

Harpuia reached over, ruffling Phantom's hair a bit. "I could have done with a little less of a freak-out when Phantom pulled me from the city, but with the situation being what it was…" Harpuia fell silent at that.

"Harpy?" Phantom asked at the sudden silence.

"Oh, no," he murmured. "If this…you…Levi is going to _kill_ us if we do this to her."

Phantom cracked a smile. "Not if we do it and raid the city for chocolates beforehand as a peace offering."

Rock blinked and tilted his head slightly, "Chocolates?"

Phantom nodded, looking to Rock. "They're a favorite treat of the humans, a mix of…what," he said, looking to Harpuia, "cocoa, milk, and sugar?"

"At its most basic, yeah," Harpuia replied. "It's really sweet. Normally, we don't eat since it's not necessary for Reploids like it is for humans, but Father had a habit of getting us a small bit of our favorite food for our activation…for our birthdays. Leviathan always wanted chocolate."

X looked at his sons. "Did Copy X continue with that after he took over in the city?"

Phantom shook his head. "No, but we thought it had to do with what had been going on in the city. We started doing that for each other in your place…well…"

X waved his hand dismissively. "I know what you meant," and he smiled at the hug huddle again.

Rock blinked and nodded, still looking mildly confused. Although, given his status as a newbuilt, he often had that expression on his face.

"So, what now?" Harpuia asked. "I've still got a ton of questions flying around, but this being the Resistance, I'm…I'm not sure how my presence will be viewed." He was an enemy to them, after all.

"If it comes down to it, probably with you in cuffs and without access to the net for a few days," Phantom said, "but I'm sure Father and I could convince them to simply let us bunk together. They trust me as it is, and I was the one that made the decision to get you out of the city."

Harpuia looked to X. "You have prisoner detainment protocols here?"

X shrugged. "We do, but seeing the situation as it is, my co-commander and I can probably override those, provided you don't decide that beating the daylights out of your brother and trying to let the city know we're here is a better idea."

A shake of his head. "Of course not. Now that I'm aware that I've been wrong this whole time..." He looked down, leaned into his brother, and nodded. "The Resistance has my full support, Father." Though, at this, he turned to look at Phantom. "What about the coordinates you provided? I know you gave them to someone in case Fa…in case Copy X asked for them."

"Magnion doesn't have valid coordinates. I'm not stupid enough to willingly betray the city and then let them know where I went traipsing off to." Although…

"You think they'll launch an offensive?" X asked.

"It's possible," Phantom said, "unless Copy X takes this as part of my 'proof of allegiance' to the Resistance."

"They don't know where this base is, either way," Shadow reminded them. "Tracking us back here is impossible and you're not broadcasting anything," or, at least, nothing that could act as a beacon. "At this point, choosing the battlefield and the day is our luxury, not theirs."

X nodded. "That is true. Phantom, I doubt anyone will take it the wrong way to see Harpuia without cuffs, but I want you to escort him to my room. Get him up to speed and I'll talk this over with Ciel and the sec team, see if we can get the all-clear. Once that's taken care of," he said, looking to Cerveau, "will Harpuia's armor be ready by the end of the day?"

"Yes, I think so," Cerveau nodded. It hadn't been in terrible shape, though there was certainly a good deal of work to be done. It'd take up his afternoon and evening, at any rate.

Phantom got to his feet, moving for the back of Cerveau's lab and returning with a sheet, draping the cloth over Harpuia's shoulders. "Hip armor or no, if I got a sheet, you get a sheet," he said. "Let's get downstairs so you can stop staring at everyone like you have no idea what's going on."

"I don't have any idea what's going on," Harpuia shot back, "or, at least, not any comprehensive idea."

Phantom smiled. "Then this prank is still going strong, red eyes or no."

Harpuia glared at him as he pulled away from Rock and stood. "You're a jerk."

"You just forgot how to have fun," Phantom said with a shrug.

Harpuia reached out, grabbing Phantom around the neck and dragging him down into a chokehold, rubbing his knuckles fiercely against Phantom's skull. "You usually let me _in_ on the joke," he retorted. "Way to break up the team, shadow brat."

Rock moved back to Elec's side, a bit confused by what Harpuia was doing—Rock realized after a moment that he was just teasing, even if it looked like an attack.

Elec looked down to Rock, began scanning him and checking his overall status and energy levels. His core wasn't quite low-low yet, but still getting to the point where they liked to recharge anyway. Perhaps he should put Rock to bed for a few hours before continuing with the research in the lab.

Wrapping one arm around his elder brother's shoulders once he freed himself of the chokehold, Phantom led Harpuia out of the lab, rubbing idly at his head where Harpuia's knuckles had grated against his scalp.


	28. The Pain of Loss

_I am so, so sorry for the late update. I got my days flip-flopped, and a lot's been going on. I am also sorry for the chapter's length: it is, by far, the shortest chapter we've cut thus far, and by a large margin, but we felt that including it with the previous and subsequent scenes would have been a detractor._

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><p>Copy X's terminal beeped, and the Reploid turned, glaring at the screen for a moment and the blinking red icon in the corner. Who would send a priority alert through his terminal instead of to him? Leaning over, he touched the icon with one finger, the small box widening into a video feed screen. "May I ask why this contact had to go through my terminal?"<p>

The Reploid on the other end bowed, likely looking into a small camera, and replied, "I apologize for the disturbance and the unusual means of contact, Master X, but we found something beneath the city that I think you may want to see."

"And this has what to do with me?"

"I think we discovered what happened to General Harpuia," and the camera moved, the image shaking a bit, as the lens refocused on something on a far wall.

Copy X felt his systems run cold for a half-second before the rage fired through him, and he had to hold back, had to keep himself from screaming at the unit.

The image had focused on a pair of familiar sabers pinned to the wall by a pair of equally-recognizable kunai.

"Your designation, unit?" Copy X asked.

"SR-105," he answered readily.

"Then, SR-105, I would like for you to remove the items from the wall, _intact_, place them in a transport container, and have that container brought to my chambers. Five minutes ago," and his tone was icy. "How many other units are down there with you?"

"Yes, sir," the unit replied, and Copy X was sure that he'd seen a tremble in the unit. "And there are four other SRs here."

"Thank you," Copy X said. "I'll ensure you are commended for this discovery." As soon as the connection was cut, Copy X linked into the communication relays, sending emergency contact messages out to Fefnir and Leviathan, relaying that they had to get to the city, to Neo Arcadia Tower, as quickly as possible. Once both units had verified that they were en route, Copy X moved to his door, leaning out and tapping one of the Zan'ei assassins on the shoulder. A quick order was whispered, along with coordinates, and the unit nodded, bolting for the lift and the five workers down below the city that would never see the light of day again.

Copy X closed the door then, pacing across the room. Two days prior, when Harpuia had failed to report in after his patrol, Copy X had been quick to inform the military that the Rekku General had been reassigned to a classified mission and that he would return to the city as soon as he had completed his mission objective. Even the Reploid's siblings had bought the story, shrugging it off as Master X simply putting Harpuia into the position vacated by Phantom's flight from the city. Now? Copy X sighed, rubbing at his eyes, wondering just how much screaming he was going to have to deal with, especially from the female unit, when they discovered what had _really_ happened to their eldest brother.

* * *

><p>Fefnir stopped short of the door to his father's room, bowing to the Zan'ei posted there, and was quickly ushered in. Stepping past the threshold, he was confused to find his father running his thumbs along a nondescript metal box. "Master X?"<p>

Copy X held a hand up, indicating he wanted silence. "I'm still waiting for General Leviathan," he replied.

Fefnir nodded, figuring that Harpuia was only absent because of the mission he'd been sent on, though it did ring wrong with the unit that his elder brother would take so long on a mission.

Like Fefnir, Harpuia held himself to a very high standard of performance.

Being that Leviathan was stationed in the oceans and her patrols could become very wide and sporadic, it took her a bit longer to get to Neo Arcadia and into the Tower than it did Fefnir. She'd been notified almost immediately, however, and most of her tardiness was due to the time it took to get to the nearest Trans Server.

But the Meikai General moved quickly, distance or no, she was in the Tower and entering Copy X's chambers only about ten minutes after Fefnir. Of the four of them, she was usually the last to arrive when summoned, unless one of the others was on a mission that required being even _further_ from Neo Arcadia than she.

Her eyes swept the room and she was unable to keep the worry from flickering across her features, "Where's Harpuia?"

Copy X sighed heavily, looking to Leviathan for a moment before tossing the box in her direction. There was a loud metallic clanking from inside as the box flew through the air. "That should be answer enough."

She caught the box deftly, giving Copy X a strange look before opening the box. When the lock unhinged and the top swung open, Leviathan froze, color draining from her face. With a strangled sound, she actually dropped the box, her hands flying to her mouth as she took a horrified step back, the contents clattering over the floor.

They were Harpuia's ruined sabers and Phantom's kunai.

And now, Fairy Leviathan, General of the great Meikai army, was trembling like a leaf, honestly torn between screaming and sobbing.

"What the…Father, what the _fuck_ is this?" Fefnir roared. "You told us—"

"I _lied_," Copy X said, glaring at Fefnir. "I lied because I didn't want to cause a panic when Harpuia didn't return after his patrol, a patrol I later found out he never even reported for. And it's the second time I had to." He sighed again, looking down for a moment. "The Order of Retirement against Phantom was initially a fluke because he found out where the Resistance was located, offered to use the order as a means of gaining their trust and shutting them down from within. As you can see," and he indicated to the sabers on the ground, "his alliances have obviously changed."

Leviathan didn't know what to say, still struggling with her emotional protocols, rapidly switching between grief and anger. He lied to them. He _lied_ to _them_. "Why didn't you tell us?" and her voice was low and ragged with pain, ragged with grief. "You gave us _legitimate_ orders to retire Phantom to begin with. I would have _killed him_ if I'd seen him before this." And she wouldn't have had to, not then. Now, though? Her littlest brother…_Harpuia_. Phantom was as good as dead to them, but Harpuia? She'd _never_ see him again, not even as enemies on the battlefield.

Copy X nodded. "And what if I had told you? What would own troops say, with the order in place, had you welcomed your brother with open arms, treated him as if he was still one of ours? That aside, Leviathan, Phantom requested that no one, save for his own troops, be told, if only to protect him from their efforts. It was not my choice to make." Now? "Information has already been forwarded to the Judges and the order is now in full effect against Phantom."

Leviathan's grief-laden eyes flashed dangerously. She was angry, angry with her father, angry with Phantom, angry with everything and everyone. "So _nothing_ changes pertaining to our orders." Or, at least, to Leviathan's. One shroud had been lifted, so why did she feel like there were a dozen more still obscuring her view?

No, something was off here. Had Phantom truly been undercover and such an order been necessary, they should have been notified and Phantom should have stayed _well away_ from any of them. Mock battles, a convincing display was doable if it came to that—even if it meant real injuries, there were ways to do that. So why the lies, why the dishonesty?

She was still shaking, still trembling, but it was hard to tell now whether it was grief or rage.

"This…" Fefnir had been silent for some time, stewing in his rage, and had finally spoken, glaring at Copy X. "Father, if Phantom had found their base, found out where that damned Resistance is located, why not launch an attack? Why not go after them now, stop this before someone else in our family ends up dead?"

"It's not that simple," Copy X retorted, "especially since Phantom never left the coordinates. Knowing this now, seeing what he's become, knowing he's Maverick…I regret that I didn't ask during the Council session." Dropping into his chair, Copy X looked to his two remaining Guardians. "I really don't…I don't know what to do. I don't know what _we're_ supposed to do, if it's even the Resistance that he's working for." Maverick infection, of course, meant that anything he had said was suspect, was subject to misinterpretation. "I don't know how much of what he told us then was a lie."

"Those infected with the Maverick Virus are but shells of themselves. The virus is able to imitate them perfectly and manipulate all those around it," Leviathan quoted. That tidbit was all over history textbooks and her father would know what that meant better than anyone else alive. "We can't assume we know anything anymore," and so, they had to act like it could be anything, like it could be _everything_. They had to begin from the ground up.

And Harpuia was dead.

"I'm sorry, Leviathan. I truly am. Had we known, had he been in for a recent systems scan, we could have caught this, but…"

Fefnir nodded. "It scares me to know that we can be affected with you immune to it. I thought you programmed us to be immune, that whatever it was in your coding that made the virus have no effect was given to us." Were they only resistant, only immune to a point?

"Until we…until we are able to recover Phantom, if we do, we won't know what happened," Copy X said, "and I don't know what to say, Fefnir." Copy X had no idea that he was supposed to have been immune to the virus, remained holed up in the Tower to keep him as far away from any possible Maverick units. Once these two were out of his room, he was going to have to set up a virus scan on his systems. Considering how long he'd been around Phantom with no idea when the infection had set into the Zan'ei General…

"You and I should both have intensive scans," Leviathan said, looking to Fefnir, her voice still a little bit shaky, "and Phantom's officers should all be scanned as well." Really, anyone the Guardian had frequent or close contact with should. Leviathan hesitated for a moment, but didn't advise her father to have a scan.

Copy X nodded. "It would be for the best to get this taken care of now. I'll send word down to the lab, have pods ready for the both of you," and he messaged a few of the techs some floors below them. "I'm so sorry to the both of you for all of this," though, really, his only regret was losing two of his Guardians within mere weeks of losing the progenitor and the possibility of saving the city.

Leviathan nodded and bent down to gather up Harpuia's ruined sabers. Phantom's kunai pierced clean through them, ensured that they'd never power up again. She trembled a bit when she saw that; that would have been done after the fight, after Harpy was defeated.

It was a _taunt_.

For the first time in years, Fefnir didn't care about his status as one of the strongest fighters in Neo Arcadia, or his position as one of the Four Guardians, or the Maverick issue outside of the Eden Dome. As he and Leviathan boarded the lift to head down to the maintenance lab, he was simply Leviathan's brother. Silently, gently, he wrapped his arms around her and held her close.

His only concern now was protecting her.


	29. The Arrival of Winter

_Here we are at chapter 29, and honestly, this is one of my favorites. I have nothing more to say than that. So sit down, enjoy, and know that we do not own Rockman or any of the characters and that we are (lamentably) not making any monetary gain from this._

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><p>This base, the unit mused, wasn't very well protected. It was underground, which, he supposed, did afford some degree of protection, but usually, when you didn't want people getting in, you not only locked your doors, <em>but you closed them first<em>. The turrets, he guessed, functioned as something of a guard dog, but dogs weren't very effective when they could be bought over with treats.

Or turned off. Whichever.

So he walked through the open door, unhindered. No security here. Breach one. And then he walked to the lift and pushed the button to go down. After a few moments, the lift obediently arrived, completely unmanned. Breach two. His two subordinate units were flanking him from behind, each carrying a parcel, cheeping quietly to one another and occasionally to him, but they weren't concerned at all. He wasn't; why should they be?

Maps. Those were easy to find and access, too. Breach three and four were him taking the maps and accessing the networks in order to get a hold of them in the first place.

Breach five was him logging into the security network and _no one noticing_. Except Shadow, Elec, and Rock, and now old links were flaring back to life, which boosted his mood considerably.

So, the medical lab was on the fourth floor. Okay. That worked. Hopefully, there'd be someone in there and the whole base wasn't having some kind of beach day. That'd be terrible if he missed it.

With a chime, the lift landed on the fourth level and he stepped off, pausing to give his two subordinate units a moment to catch up. The one case was especially heavy.

Canard had just been leaving Cerveau's lab, his maintenance complete and his body quickly adjusting to the new supply of nutrients for his auto-repairs, when he heard an odd chirping sound and looked down the hall. His face screwed into a mask of confusion even as his pace increased, crossing the distance to the unfamiliar unit in short order. "Kid, where do you think you're going?" This unit looked to be about the same size and AI range as Rock, though the penguin mechaniloids trailing him were unfamiliar. And that said nothing about the snowsuit this one was wearing, flecked here and there with sand. Had he _walked_ here?

Ice blinked up to Canard, smiling, "The med lab. That's on this level, right?" Ice wasn't irked that this unit addressed him as a child: sometimes, playing that angle up was beneficial, particularly if the other was a bit slow on the uptake. The two penguins were in perfect step with Ice, moving with him almost as one and when he paused to answer the Reploid, they also paused mid-step.

Canard glared down at the unit a bit, "Yeah, but how do you know that? You like the rest of these Robot Masters, taking over the network like you think you own something?" He bent down a bit to poke Ice in the chest, though the motion wasn't able to budge the shorter unit, considering his weight. "I'm about sick of your kind waltzing in here like you own the place and expecting us to just take it like we don't have a choice. That ninja was a bad enough issue, but for _another_ of you to just move past all our security measures without raising an alarm? The hell are you trying to prove?"

"That does not answer my question," Ice said, his gaze following Canard's hand as he was poked in the chest. His icy blues eyes snapped up to meet Canard's. "And five. There were five security breaches that brought me this far," Ice blinked, "Six if you count the turrets."

"Six…Listen, I don't know how the five of you think you're so high and mighty that you can just push us around. And you know what? Were it not for that…Blues or whatever the hell his name is booting me off the network, I'd just as soon think the lot of you are lying through your teeth about 'managing' our networks here. Now, instead of telling me just how much—"

Ice shifted, his cheeks filling like he'd just filled his mouth with air. He brought one hand to the side of his mouth, then spat with his ability at the Reploid, freezing his mouth shut along with the bottom half of his face. "I find it hard to believe that the others have been putting up with your mouth. Or is it that I'm a small unit, so you feel more comfortable pushing _me_ around? A child's face must equal a child's mind, right? Don't be stupid; we're _robots_. We're built to look like _whatever our creator wanted us to_."

Ice stepped back from Canard, then, looking the unit over, thoroughly unimpressed, "My being here has nothing to do with you, so you can be on your way."

Canard glared after the unit, clawing at the sheet of ice over his mouth. Unable to use his vocal processor, Canard screamed a long string of insults across the public communication channel aimed at the robot. If he was on the network, like Canard figured he was, he was hearing this _loud and clear_.

Harpuia and Phantom both shot their heads up, looking around the room.

"What's wrong?" X asked.

"What the hell is wrong with that unit?" Harpuia asked, looking to Phantom.

Phantom shrugged. "I've never heard Canard get out of line on the _net_," he answered, "though…Father, I think we just got a new Robot Master in the base from the hissy fit Canard's throwing."

X sighed. "I'll be back," he said, moving to the terminal in his room and loading onto the network.

"Cute," Ice said, tilting his head to Canard, "but I can do something much, much cuter." And with that, the little Robot Master claimed _public_ ownership of the network, spreading from communications to security, to medical over every network in the base. His presence was _enormous_, engulfing the entire network, filling every corner, an inescapable presence. He towered over everyone else there, but didn't pay them much mind, instead turning his attention toward actually managing the network, feeling Shadow back off where Ice was picking up.

X had only managed to catch the tail end of Canard's rant before a soft voice had retorted about doing something cuter, and the next thing X knew, Ice's song in the Harmony was _screaming _in his ears, the presence of the Robot Master publicly managing the network making X feel a tenth the size of his pixie elf form.

Around the base, the Reploids were adjusting to the sudden overwhelming pressure against their online signals, more than a few logging off. While the pain didn't manifest physically, didn't cause discomfort to them in any way that would register to their systems, the push they'd felt was like a ten-ton boulder pressing down against a cotton ball.

Vigile quickly set up a broadcast wave across communications and security networks. '_Unknown unit, this is security monitor Vigile, please respond and identify._' She blinked against the pressure on both networks. '_Unknown unit, please respond,_' she repeated, wondering if this was what had been meant by the Robot Masters not publicly taking over the networks. She idly hoped that the others would keep their signals cloaked.

Ice blinked, still keeping one eye on Canard even as he responded over the network, '_Hello, security monitor Vigile,_' and there was none of the sarcasm that'd been present in his voice when speaking to the Reploid kneeling in front of him, '_I'm sorry for the intrusion. My name is Ice._'

Phantom actually grinned from ear to ear at that, laughing a bit as he turned and hugged Harpuia. Opening a public comm line, he couldn't keep the mirth out of his voice, '_Hi, Uncle Ice!_' he called out.

"Uncle Ice?" Harpuia said, even as Phantom was pulling him to his feet and leading them both out of the room. "Phantom, where are we going?"

"Lift first, figure the rest out later," Phantom said. '_Uncle Ice, what floor are you on?_'

'_Phantom,_' X said, his tone a bit stern, '_settle down._' His attention turned back to Ice then. '_It's good to know you're here, brother,_' X greeted, '_even if my son is being a bit overexcited at the moment._'

Uncle? Son? _X has kids?_ Ice blinked at that, more than a little surprised by the revelation, but responded with a chipper, '_Fourth floor, that's the med lab, right?_' And then he winced as Elec began seriously laying into him about appearing publically. Ice's line with Rock and Elec alike had been thrumming since he set foot in the base.

What was more interesting was how X was rigged to even speak via the networks. Word had gotten around about X's current disembodied condition, but feeling the link…well, it was good he could do it either way. Ice reached out and reinforced the link, acknowledging X and welcoming him to the Light family tree, late of a welcome as it was.

'_Pleasure to meet you, Ice-dono,_' Dande said across the network. '_And welcome to the Resistance base._' At the back of his mind, however, was a request for the unit to _back off_ the net a little.

X moved quickly for the bank of terminals on the fourth floor, picking one and ejected from the net in the hallway just before Cerveau's lab. Moving back towards the lift as soon as he solidified his manifestation, he was surprised to find Canard struggling with something—was that a sheet of _ice_?-on his mouth, and he shook his head as he stopped near Canard and Ice…and two Peng units, from the looks of it. X bowed, "Hello, Ice," he greeting, shooting a disapproving look at Canard. "The unit here been giving you grief?"

Only the soft hum of Harpuia's thrusters gave away the pair of Reploids, the two coming quickly up the nearby ladder shaft, Phantom smiling all the harder when he saw Ice. Tempted though he was to hug the smaller robot, he and Harpuia both stopped just behind X, bowing in unison.

"My sons, Harpuia and Phantom," X introduced with a smile, rolling his eyes at his kids. "Shadow is going to be disappointed in you, Phantom," X chided over his shoulder. "I could hear you two coming from a whole floor away."

"That was Harpy, not me," Phantom countered.

"Not my fault I don't run silent," Harpuia said, nudging Phantom's shoulder. "I'm not the ninja of the family."

Ice glanced to Canard, frowning again. Hadn't he told him he could go? "Just a little bit. He's been quiet now." And Ice smirked more than a little mischievously; Canard wasn't quiet by any choice of his. Ice bowed to X, Harpuia, and Phantom then, "It's good to meet all three of you. I am DLN-005, Ice Man." Both Peng units mimicked Ice's motions, bowing in time with him, keeping their balance despite their parcels.

There were more footfalls from the end of the hall and Rock barreled past X and company, barreling into Ice at full speed in an exuberant hello, laughing happily the whole while. He neatly knocked Ice over, sending the two Peng units scattering, guarding their parcels from any potential harm. Ice began laughing then, even as Rock caught him in a death grip hug. "It's good to see you, too, Rock."

"Cloak yourself on the network, Ice; Blues gave orders to remain hidden when online," and Elec was suddenly there, frowning sternly down to the smaller (but older) unit.

"No, he's been too considerate. They've had long enough to adjust to us being physically here in the base; we can help the best if we're _unhindered_. I will not cloak."

Elec shook his head, but shrugged helplessly; it was Ice's funeral, not his.

Harpuia and Phantom both moved for where Ice and Rock were, joining the hug for a moment before pulling away. Phantom noticed the Peng then, though they had technically caught his attention the minute he'd hit the fourth level. "Peng!" he cried happily, leaning down to look at the units. "Uncle Ice, these are the same kind of units that you and Uncle Rock went sledding on, right?"

"Sledding?" Harpuia looked to his brother, then to the penguin-like mechaniloids. "How?"

Phantom looked up to Harpuia, then at Ice, then over to X. "Should I take him back to the room and show him the file, Father?" Phantom asked.

X nodded. "It would probably be easier than trying to give him a play-by-play in the hallway." X made a soft motion with his hands, and both Reploids were down the ladder shaft and moving for their room immediately. Smirking a bit, he looked to Canard then. "It'll melt off eventually, but let this be a lesson, hm? And the last one anyone has to teach you. Now get."

Canard frowned, but his eyes held remorse and a bit of worry, and he moved for the lift, still scratching at the ice holding his mouth shut.

Elec sighed once Canard was out of sight and out of earshot, looking down to the Rock-and-Ice hug pile. The two smaller units looked content to just cuddle for the moment, but there was something they needed to do. "Ice, let's get moving."

"Oh, right, we don't have much time," and Ice straightened, motioning the Peng back over as he caught Rock by the hand. "The med lab," Ice glanced to X, "it's on this floor, right?"

"Yeah," X said, moving for the med lab. "You brought parts to repair Blues' arm, I suppose?" X asked, looking to Ice, "Since he's still offline for maintenance, you'll be able to work on him before he wakes?"

"Um, no," Ice said slowly, glancing away from X even as he pulled Rock along toward the med lab, "We're working on Rock today."

"Working on…" X fell silent, though he continued walking, waving amicably to Cerveau as he walked into the lab. "What do you mean, working on Rock?"

Once Ice, Rock, and Elec were in the lab, Ice made a vague gesture toward one of the tables even as he greeted Cerveau, "I hope you don't mind if we borrow your lab for a little bit. We're fixing Rock." The two Peng units moved forward, very gracefully considering their design, and hefted both parcels onto one of the exam tables. They were both black plastic boxes, securely locked with metal clasps and, by their shape and design, very heavily padded on the inside.

"Not at all, just let me know if there's anything you need that's not out," Cerveau said agreeably though he was more than a little intimidated by Ice's overwhelming presence on the network, benign though he was.

"He means we're replacing Rock's faulty memory card with his backup today," Elec answered X's question, watching Ice's units begin to prepare the tools for him.

X had completely forgotten that Blues mentioned backup data, though, "What about the memories he's developed since he was activated here?" though, honestly, X could have used without the ones Rock had of X's outburst.

"We're going to transfer those memories to the backup card," Ice answered. He also brought a blank to create the new backup with. "But we need to move quickly. Rock, up." Ice was already on a stool, one of the Peng units having wheeled it over for him, and he patted the exam table expectantly.

Rock climbed up onto the table, lying down even as Ice cracked the smaller of the cases open and produced a wire and a small device. "Okay, just copy your recent memories onto here…"

* * *

><p>Downstairs, Blues found himself slowly coming online, a priority alert jerking him from his offline mode: this was something he needed to consciously review. From Shadow?<p>

…Ice was here? He was…

Blues couldn't even be amused. _This was not funny_.

It took Blues a few moments to boot fully and all of his arrays came online at once, pain radiating over his systems from his broken arm and shoulder, from his core, and from his head. He groaned and quickly offlined what he could, balancing the suppressed feelings with his core's volatility. He slipped online, but cloaked himself so solidly that Ice, Elec, and Rock did not detect him.

And then Rock went offline.

He needed to be up there _ten minutes ago_.

* * *

><p>Phantom had moved for the ladder shaft to the sixth floor, barely noticing that Harpuia had dropped down behind him head-first. It was only as his elder brother's arms wrapped around his middle that he realized why, and the two of them made it about ten or so feet on Harpuia's glide before they crashed to the floor, rolling over each other, giggling the whole while.<p>

"You dolt!" Phantom managed, unable to stop laughing. "You can't manage an extended glide with a second unit _and_ your thrusters off, Harpy!"

"Oh, come on, we made ten feet, easy! I used to tank after five!" Harpuia responded, laughing as he pushed himself to his feet. Dusting himself off, he looked up, and his laughter stopped cold. "Um…Phantom?" he squeaked out.

Phantom took a moment to get under control, then looked down the hall, his laughter also quickly petering out. "Oh, _crap_," Phantom said, getting to his feet and pushing Harpuia against a nearby wall. "Just stay quiet and bow while he passes," he instructed, quickly bowing.

Harpuia mimicked his brother, remaining quiet until the unit passed and was on the lift. "Phantom, was that…?"

"The other progenitor, yes," Phantom answered, a quiet shudder running through his systems. "Uncle Blues looked _pissed_."

"I wonder what's wrong?"

"We're probably better off not knowing," Phantom said. "Besides, we've got something of our own to attend to," and with that, Phantom shot off down the hall, Harpuia close on his tail.

* * *

><p>Rock was on his stomach now, the transfer to the new memory chip completed. He'd just gone offline and Ice felt along Rock's scalp with both hands, quickly finding the release for his head case, the piece sliding back and exposing his internal parts.<p>

"We don't have much time," Elec warned Ice, and both Robot Masters were becoming agitated.

"Unfortunately, this isn't something we can just throw together," Ice retorted, wiping his hands off in a cloth designed to remove static before carefully picking up the new memory chip.

Another tense fifteen seconds passed, and Ice just slotted the new chip in when a livid voice came from behind X, from the lab door, "_And what do you think you're doing?_"

X wheeled around immediately, eyes going wide at Blues' tone, and he took a few unsteady steps backwards, only remaining upright because he wasn't actually touching the floor. "Blues, they're just—"

Shadow appeared behind Blues, blades in hand, and swung down on him, but Blues spun around, catching Shadow's wrist with his good arm, twisting the other Robot Master's arm and forcing him down into what was almost a bow. Blues' bad arm was inside of his coat like a sling, close to his body and out of his way.

Elec darted forward then, pressing his finger to the back of Blues' neck and delivering a shock, shutting him down immediately. Shadow twisted free of Blues' suddenly lax grip and caught the older Robot Master before he could hit the floor.

"Get him onto a lab table," Elec told Shadow as the other Peng took the larger, unopened parcel from where it'd been sitting beside Ice and moved it to the table Shadow was lying Blues on. "I'll get these off," Elec said, even as Shadow administered a better sedative.

"I can keep him down for four hours at a time," the ninja said, helping Elec undo the trench coat and coax Blues from it.

X stood, caught in place, as the units started to remove the layers of clothing covering his eldest brother. It was a long moment before, "What are you _doing_?" Wouldn't it have been easier to get Blues to…

Oh.

Oh, wow.

"Is he normally this difficult when it comes to having regular maintenance and repairs done?"

"The is the _only_ way to get him to have any kind of maintenance or repairs done," Elec responded. Their work at undressing Blues was revealing a grey bodysuit beneath. He had a red belt at his waist and his arms and legs below his elbow and knees were a slightly different black-colored material to interface with his armor.

"We'd have told you, but Elec and Shadow said you're just like Rock, and Rock can't lie to Blues worth anything," Ice added, closing up Rock's head case. "There, done!"

"Get him online quickly," Elec said, handing Blues' pants off to one of the Peng units for folding.

X moved over to the table where Ice was. "Is there anything Cerveau or I could help with?" he asked. Inwardly, his mind was _still_ trying to process what he'd seen Elec and Shadow do, wondering if it was normally a multi-unit effort to get Blues to offline.

Elec situated Blues into an even position on his back, then looked to Ice expectantly.

Rock stirred then, sitting up slowly, a hand to his head as his systems recognized the new memory chip and integrated it. He ran some basic systems checks, then shook his head a bit, but froze when he caught sight of Blues lying prone on the exam table and Elec's gaze staring straight back at Rock. When he spoke, he sounded exasperated, "You guys, why didn't you just come _during_ his cycle and kill two birds with one stone?" The very human euphemism was nothing compared to Rock's tone of voice. This was a unit that knew what it was doing. "I'll take care of it. Everyone, out."

It wasn't a request.

And here X was, just getting over one surprise when another one all but smacked him in the face. He stood next to the table, unable to move, watching as Rock pushed himself from the table and moved over to Blues.

X couldn't even find his _voice_ as he watched the elder Lightbot.

"I'm sorry," Rock said, turning to Cerveau and bowing slightly in apology, "but I'm going to have to ask that you leave as well. It's bad enough that we're doing this to him. I refuse to repair him with an audience."

Elec moved over to X then, generating a field around his hand and gripping X's arm, pulling him slightly, "Come on, X."

Ice was already at the door, though his Peng remained behind to assist Rock if need be. "Message us when you're done, Rock."

Rock morphed his arm into his variable system and smiled to everyone, "It shouldn't take much longer than a few hours." Three, maybe, if only because Blues needed so much replaced.

With that, Elec dragged X the rest of the way out of the room, Cerveau already out the door by now. The lab doors shut tightly behind them, a locking program going up on them to make sure no unwary Resistance members wandered in during the procedure.

"Well," Ice said, "that went better than I expected. I didn't even have to help with offlining him."

Elec shook his head, "His arm was broken." They'd have needed all three to get him down otherwise.

"He…" X finally muttered, staring at the door, Elec's hand still embracing his arm, holding him in place.

"X, are you okay?" Ice asked, frowning up at the Cyber Elf.

X shook his head. "I…He…" The elf bowed his head, and his form shook a bit, blurred along the edges. "He sounds just like he did all those years ago in the lab. Back when he and Light had been working on me." Were it not for the fact that his memory files, despite some moderate age damage, were still fairly intact, he was sure this would have triggered a file recovery effort in his systems. "It's a sudden change from the newbuilt I've been used to working with."

And his voice…sounded so much older, so very _tired_, as if something was weighing heavily on him.

Ice nodded, considering what X said, "It _is_ a sudden changeover, but I think you'll find it to be an agreeable one. He's worried about Blues. The two of them worry after one another constantly," looked out for one another constantly. "And they haven't been having an easy few weeks," Blues especially. "Elec and I came partially for this and partially to…divide the workload." Blues had enough on his plate, it wasn't fair to expect him to babysit this base.

"No, I know that," X said, still looking at the door. "It's just…" For a moment, concern for Zero flickered across his mind, about how the android was still lost in his memories because so many were still missing. X shook his head again, as if clearing his mind, and looked to Elec. "Elec, please let me go. I'm not going to go back in there. Promise."

"I should tell you that if you're in there when Blues wakes up…Rock is the only unit he authorizes to work on him. He will wake up, arm his buster, and shoot anyone else who is in there." He'd know; he'd been shot at more than once. But Elec did release X.

X floated closer to Ice, setting his hand near the shorter unit's shoulder. "I'm…thank you for bringing his memory chip. He needed it, especially after everything that's been going on."

Ice looked up to X again, his gaze sharp and scrutinizing as he frowned up to the Cyber Elf. "There's something else, isn't there? You're worried about something else, too."

Elec blinked, "It's Zero, isn't it?" That was the only other major worry Elec could apply for X at the moment.

X looked at Elec for a moment before nodding. "Part of me is…I'm jealous that it was so damn easy for Rock when Zero's…" X clammed up again. "Don't worry about it," he said. The android just needed time.

Ice looked to Elec quizzically, his expression going from confusion to amazement to exasperation in short order. The little unit turned to X, "He's been hiding in his room for _ten days?_" And they _let_ him? Really? Ice could understand some time to get himself together, but ten days? With no contact, no charger, just brooding? That was _not_ healthy no matter how you looked at it.

"Hiding in a room he thoroughly trashed," X said. "Shadow's been keeping an eye on him and I've stopped by to visit a few times, but," and he shrugged. "For not having a certain batch of memories, he's still acting the same as he always did when he was upset. Only difference now is there's no training facility for him to let it out at."

Ice turned to look ahead of them, calculating. "What floor is he on?"

"No, Ice, really," X said, panic rising in his eyes, "it's nothing to worry about. He's still got at least another four days before he's draining his last sub-tank, so just…he'll come out before then. Just let it run its course." Only thing X ever knew worse than a brooding Zero was a Zero disturbed from his brooding.

"He's on the sixth level," Shadow supplied, suddenly appearing behind them.

"Ten days?" Ice asked, as though he needed to hear it again to believe it.

"Ten days. He won't come out on his own."

"We'll be back," Ice said, turning and heading toward the lift, Shadow quickly dipping into Ice's shadow.

X moved to follow behind Ice, reaching out as if he could stop the unit, feeling himself stop short as Elec's hand wrapped back around X's arm. "Elec, let me go. Ice, really! Don't worry about it!" He didn't need Zero lashing out at either of the Robot Masters currently headed to his room. "Dammit, Elec, let me go!"

"Zero needs an intervention. Ice has…a way with people," Elec said, holding fast on X's arm. "He's going to make himself sick if he broods like that, it's not good for his mind."

"Them butting in isn't going to be good for him either," X said, his voice pleading. "Believe me, I dealt with some pretty severe lows before, I know this will just run its course. Elec, please, let me go, let me stop them, don't let them force him to…" X pulled hard against Elec's grip, futile though the effort was. "Please, Elec…"

"It's never pretty during an intervention. Zero will be better off for it. Come on," Elec pulled on X, pulled him away from the lift, "I'd say you should let the rest of the base know about Ice, but Ice already told them. We need to find something productive to do, and _not_ still be standing here when Blues wakes." Seriously.

X tried once more to pull away, to get to Zero before Ice and Shadow did, his emotional programming screaming at him, and X choked off the connections he had with the Robot Masters. While keeping the links active, he shut down his outgoing half of the link, caging himself and his reeling emotions within his own mind. Finally giving up on moving away from Elec, X simply turned in his arm, moving closer to the unit, a soft whisper of a question flitting across their link.

Elec didn't question it this time, just pulled X into an embrace, brow furrowing when X blocked off his outgoing feelings. It was strange, wasn't something Robot Masters that weren't Blues generally did, but he didn't question the android. He did make a note, however, that X's emotional matrices seemed to be a bit unsteady and to find out, when X was calmer, whether X was able to run maintenance on his mind.

* * *

><p>Shadow directed Ice straight to Zero's door, but remained out of sight. The small unit blinked up at the fob for several moments before knocking, his hearing turned way up to catch any movement from within.<p>

_"Verschwinde und lass mich in Ruhe!__" _came the curt reply.

"Oh, he's _friendly_," Ice muttered, stepping back from the door. Unfortunately for Zero, leaving him alone was not part of Ice's day plan.

Shadow, on the other hand, rolled his eyes and moved into Zero's room. It was already fairly dark in there, so it was very easy to slip into a shadow near Zero, grab him by the hair, and pull him through his bed. When Zero was finally back in the physical plane, he was on the floor outside his room, a small unit in a parka looking him over like a doctor doing diagnostics.

"He needs a bath and clothes before anything else," the unit said to Shadow, frowning.

_"Was zum Teufel willst du, Ice?" _Zero said, mind frantically trying to undo the locks on his door, trying to move just fast enough that the locks didn't recode the instant he got the encryption broken down.

He'd managed three of the layers before Ice grabbed him and started dragging him down the hallway.

"I _want_ you to right your head," Ice said. It was a bit comical to see such a small unit forcibly dragging the legendary Maverick Hunter through the halls, his older brother trailing a bit behind them. "You've been moping in there alone for over a week. Look at you—you're _covered_ in coolant and other fluids," like blood, "and you're so…" Ice glanced back at Zero when he snagged one of the doorframes, giving the android a good jerk to get him loose, "So far gone that you're not even acclimating to the language being used around you. Or are you just trying to be difficult? I understand German quite well," though Ice wasn't going to coddle Zero by speaking it.

"There has to be at least once bath in this place; there's a human here. We're going to clean you up. I'm tired of you making sad faces alone in there, and I'm tired of the impact it's been having on the people in this base," even though he'd barely been in the base an hour.

_"Und wer zur Hölle glaubst du zu sein, dass du beurteilen kannst was ich brauche__ Lightbot?" _Zero snarled back, glaring at Shadow when the elder Wilybot kicked his hand away from another doorframe. _"Du hast keine Ahnung was ich durchgemacht habe!"_

"I have no idea what you've been through? What's so terrible, Zero?" Ice frowned down at the android. "What's so bad that you'd rather wallow in your room and make a mess that someone else will have to clean up? And answer in _English_ this time."

Zero cowered a bit at the Lightbot's tone, curled a bit in on himself, and a shudder ran though his entire body. "The memories," he admitted, his voice barely above a whisper. "Remembering what Father wanted done to your family, what he wanted me to do to the world. Remembering the lives I took when they woke me, remembering all those I killed when my hands weren't mine, when I was caged behind my eyes, forced to watch on as I started a bloodbath. Knowing that I was meant to kill X when I know he's important to me even though I can't remember _why_." Zero actually whimpered at that, biting on his lip as he wiped his eyes. He wasn't going to start crying _again_. Hadn't he drained whatever part of his system made tears by now anyway?

"You think that I don't…" Ice started, an offended tone creeping into his voice before he stopped himself and turned back to Zero, giving him a _look_. "You…" The Lightbot stopped again, vetoing a replay of the memories before continuing, "You think that I have no idea what it feels like? I thought you had your memories back, but you're telling me you think you're the _only_ unit to ever wake on a lab table, as though from a bad dream, and realize that you—with your hands, _with your body_, hurt others? Killed others? _I_ was one of the lucky ones. When I woke in Doctor Light's lab after the First War, _my_ death count was low, barely over five hundred. The others, though? _We did that with our own hands_. And we have to _live with that_. Every day. Don't think you're the only one who…the only one whose will was stolen form them."

"Five hun…" Zero looked positively sick and he cowered more, tried to pull away from Ice. "I…I didn't know. Father…he only…he told me…what…what…what I was…" Zero broke down into actual tears then. "Forgive me. I didn't know."

Okay, now Ice felt bad. He moved over to Zero, leaned down, and hugged him even as he glanced up at Shadow, clearly wanting to know why these androids were so emotional. Zero needed to debug, too, as far as Ice was concerned. "Come on, get up. I'm not going to drag you all the way to the bath." Zero needed to walk on his own and stop wallowing. "The important thing isn't what could have been, it's what is and what will be done. What matters is what you do do with your time." With that, Ice signaled the lift, stepping a bit away from Zero, satisfied that he'd at least not go scrabbling back to his door.

"Second floor," Ice said, having just received a message from Elec where the human was quartered and that her Reploid guard was expecting them.

Zero got to his feet, wrapping his arms around himself once Ice let him go, looking to the floor. Were it not for the matted mess that his hair currently was, the blonde locks would have framed his face and hidden most of his face from view. "I don't see why you're so insistent that I need a bath," he said as the lift settled into place on their level. "I'm not a human, y'know." Even if he was a horrid mess, it was nothing he couldn't take care of with a wet rag and by giving his nanites something else to do in their spare time.

"You're acting like one," Ice pointed out, "and your nanites haven't been cleaning your body. Your resources are low, aren't they? A bath is most expedient." The lift arrived and chimed and Ice stepped aboard, turning to Zero expectantly. "You will not change my mind or weasel out of this. Let's go."

Shadow was still standing behind Zero, running scan after scan on him. "His reserves are down to seven percent. His nanites are doing okay, but he needs more raw materials."

"How are you _doing_ that?" Zero asked, looking to his brother. "Stop picking around in my head already."

"He's down to his last sub-tank, too." Shadow frowned at Zero.

"Seven percent? _Seven percent?_ And what are you thinking, letting yourself drain that low? Isn't there a charger pod in your room?" Ice was beside himself.

"He destroyed it," Shadow replied.

Ice stared at Zero mutely.

Zero's shoulders dropped. "I don't know what I was thinking. All I know…is that everyone in this base thinks I'm someone they should look up to, that they should admire, and despite a few of my 21XX memory files not being violent ones…I'm…I'm not the Zero they're looking for." Not as he was, not incomplete, not missing the years that had _made_ him a legend.

"You can only be yourself," Ice pointed out, even as Shadow nudged Zero forward, toward the lift. "I understand you've begun recovering memory files from that time period. Don't you think that more will restore in time and paint a fuller picture?" It'd only been a couple weeks, right? Wasn't Zero being a bit hasty?

"I don't get why more haven't," Zero replied, moving onto the lift. "The…When Blues tripped the Protocol, it auto-restored all my memories from your time period, everything in glaring clarity, even thing my father told me, all that he wanted of me, for me." Zero looked to Ice. "How am I supposed to accept that my memories from then came back and that nothing since that day has restored? How can I live with all that I know of myself being fighting and Father…" Zero sighed. "There are occasional good memories in there, but…it's…it's not enough, and now they've stopped restoring."

"How long has it been? They retrieved you the same time they found Blues, right?" Ice blinked as the lift began its ascent, "So only a few weeks. Barely half a month? Honestly, I'm a bit shocked that as much restored as it has. To get that much, all at once? That's _good_. Even if they're not-so-good memories, that means you're functioning properly, that your mind is working to get_ everything_ back. You have to focus on that, and focus on what you can impact in the here and now. That's how you live with yourself when you wake from the nightmare."

"But they've _stopped_," Zero insisted. "Since the day I attacked Blues, they've stopped restoring altogether."

"That's because you've been moping in your room, no doubt hyperfocusing on the memories you just made and recovered," Ice shot back, smiling when the elevator stopped at the second floor. "So what, were you intending to just halt all function, to let yourself waste away in there? And how much charging have you done? None? I bet you didn't even bother to set yourself to hibernate—I don't need Shadow's access privileges to see that you haven't been maintaining yourself, body and mind—so no attempts were made on file recovery during sleep mode. Which, by the way, is _the most effective time to recover them_. Memory recovery stopped because you _made it stop_."

Zero hung his head, stepping off the lift and trailing behind Ice. "I don't want to remember anything more," he finally admitted, "not if it means that I have to remember more things like that. Not if I have to relive killing the people that matter to me, killing their families." Zero looked to Ice, his eyes shaking. "I know that I was part of a para-military organization a century ago. I don't want to recover that if it's just more bloodshed. I've known too much of killing from your era alone."

"You never killed anyone from that era," Ice retorted, hesitating for a moment before verifying the room number and moving forward. "You were under construction and I doubt Wily was going to let you stagger around outside of your lab." And Zero would be staggering, particularly if his ambulatory system wasn't fully completed.

Ice was suddenly reminded of the Frankenstein monster, though he didn't communicate that thought to Zero.

"If you were fighting during the wars, if you were honestly in an organization like that, you had something to fight for," Ice continued, "something you fought for over and over again. Isn't remembering that worthwhile?" Not to mention a major facet of Zero's being?

"I…I meant killing in the sense…Ice, I look at you, at Rock, at Blues, at _Shadow_, and I remember every single thing Father ever told me about how I was supposed to destroy you. It…I know that what happened a century ago is important to me, is beyond important to X, but…" Zero stopped only long enough for Shadow to give him a gentle shove to get him moving again. "I was the reason the wars started a century ago, Ice. Didn't X tell you? Father built me with a virus meant to enslave the entire Reploid race. I was the reason the bloodshed started in my time. I don't want to remember that, not if the only reason I was fighting was for my redemption."

Ciel poked her head out of her room at the sound of approaching voices, had been listening for some time, and her hand went to her mouth to hide the shocked sound she made. "Master Zero…" she said, moving for the unit.

"Ciel," Zero said, shaking his head, "Not now."

"No," she insisted, hands moving to his shoulders and stopping him. "Master Zero, look at me," she said, trying to get the android's attention. "_Look_ at me."

Zero shook his head, but his shaking ebony eyes rose to meet hers. "There's nothing you can say—"

"It wasn't for you that you fought," she said. "I remember the history books, and I remember the stories. You weren't fighting for yourself. You were fighting for the hopes of everyone from that time, for the lives that you could still save, from those that weren't infected or couldn't be. And I _know_ you restored the fight with Omega. I've seen the memory recovery logs that Cerveau put together. The entire reason you fought…you said it yourself that day, in _that_ fight. Why don't you want to remember that?"

The blonde actually gaped for a moment. He'd been ignoring that memory the entire time, lost in the fact that it was one of the last things he'd told X before everything went to shit. "My power…my power…is meant…"

Ciel nodded. "Say it."

"My power is meant for protecting the things my friends and I believe in," Zero managed.

Milan approached then, smiling a bit. "No one, in all the textbooks, in all the stories, holds you accountable for the wars," Milan said, resting a hand on Ciel's shoulder. "You're a legend not because you fought to clear your name. You're a legend to us because you were willing to stand and fight for what you believed in, not for what others made you think you had to do."

Ice nodded, but queried Shadow: did he have any data on this battle? No, only what they already quoted, from a bedtime story that X apparently often told his kids, that Phantom was telling Zero, that Rock overheard part of.

Wow, talk about a grape vine.

Okay, well, looking up history just became a much higher priority, for once things settled down and Zero was done moping and Blues was online and perhaps not so angry.

Perhaps it'd be prudent to find a quiet corner to look history up in until Blues calmed down.

Ciel moved to Zero's side, pressing a hand against his back. "Come on, Master Zero. I just started running the bath, so let's get you inside," and she pushed the android ahead of her a bit, drawing something from one of her vest pockets as she moved to his other side. Grabbing his arm, she pierced the suit and skin with expert ease, Zero crying out at the unexpected pain, and Ciel quickly injected Zero before withdrawing the syringe. "Mineral supplements for your nanites. You've been locked up in a room for over a week and you look like you tore yourself apart and only just managed to get pieced back together." She capped and pocketed the syringe. "I'm a Reploid engineer. I think I know how all of that works."

Zero frowned like a little kid. "That hurt, y'know."

Ciel had to bite back a retort at that. "Milan, take him inside," she said, turning and leaning down a little to get more on level with Ice. "I heard from Milan about your…means of greeting the Resistance, and I just wanted to welcome you myself." She offered a hand to the unit, smiling softly. "I'm Ciel."

Ice took her hand, his own covered in deceptively soft armor, like a winter's glove. "It's nice to meet you. I'm DLN-005, Ice Man." Shadow moved past them, trailing after Zero like a parent making sure their child actually took the bath _properly_. "I'm sorry about the excitement, but there were several reasons why I had to appear as I did," reasons mostly related to Blues and getting him down for repairs. "But—do you keep files on history on your networks, or is there a separate database to access?" Or even books, though those weren't nearly as convenient as files. Either way, his searches thus far didn't yield anything more than Resistance operations and very recent history. He needed a bit more than that.

Ciel nodded. "Will Ice suffice?" she asked, smiling when he nodded. "The archives we have aren't nearly as comprehensive as the ones in Neo Arcadia, what with the information access restrictions, but it's still better than nothing. One floor down, a few rooms past the Trans Server room. I can have Milan escort you down there if you'd like. If you're on the networks the way Milan described, you probably noticed that the files aren't networked. We…we're protective of those files, so the archives remain disconnected from the net. You'll have to access the computers down there to get any of the data, but I'm sure that won't pose a problem."

"I can go after Zero finishes." The Robot Master glanced toward the bathroom, "He's acting a bit like a child—not quite a newbuilt, but someone without a lot of comparative data. Which, I suppose, is exactly what he is right now. And no, accessing the terminals directly won't be a problem, but thank you." Ice was much more personable than Elec, though neither Robot Master was outright intimidating the way Blues was. He was also monitoring Rock's progress in the medical lab—he'd like to be conveniently busy when Blues did wake up, and this sort of productive research would be more likely to assuage the elder Robot Master than just idling somewhere. He knew that from Blues' point of view, if they were going to insist on being here, then they damn well be busy, helpful, and _out of his way_.

"I'll be honest when I say that I haven't even asked anyone what went on that day. Aside from what X told us…" She looked back toward her room as she got to her feet. "I can't imagine waking up missing so much of my life and then having…whatever happened to him…" Ciel shook her head a bit, smacking a bit of her hair behind one ear. "I have a few files on my personal computer, if you'd like to look at them. Most of it is just Elf Wars data, nothing much further back, but with Dark Elf being the thing keeping X from getting his body back, I spent a lot of time looking over the data, trying to figure out if it was something more than just modifying the elf's program code that did what it did to her."

Zero glared at Shadow, the Robot Master having closed the bathroom door behind them as soon as Milan had shut the water off and left. "What are you still here for?" Zero asked, sitting on the edge of the tub, hunched over and, until a moment ago, had been glaring at the floor.

"I'm making sure you actually bathe," Shadow calmly returned, his gaze switching to Zero when the android addressed him.

"You're doting," Zero returned. "I don't need spectators."

"Doting? Would you prefer I bathe you_ for you_? You haven't made any attempt to look after yourself for a week. There's no reason to expect you to start now once we turn our backs." Shadow wasn't going to be convinced until Zero provided some solid proof and his moping wasn't helping.

With a sigh, Zero reached for the base of his neck, fingers searching for the release switch on his suit, thankful at least that he hadn't damaged the back of the suit with his antics, scrap material that the clothing was otherwise notwithstanding. With the latch undone, he pulled the elastic fabric down and quickly wormed his way out of the remains of the upper half of his suit, glaring at Shadow. "There, you happy now?"

Shadow merely stared back at Zero. No, he wouldn't be happy until Zero was cleaned up and actually _presentable_. Shadow opened a private communications line with Milan, asking him whether they could have something brought up for Zero to wear: cleaning him off to help him regain his dignity wouldn't work if he just put that filthy suit back on.

'_I'll run down to Loceida's and get a new suit._' The undersuits were, to a degree, form-fitting, and Milan could eyeball Zero's height without an issue.

"Shadow, would you please go so I can bathe in peace?" Zero glared at his brother again. "Look, I'm half out of the suit already. Just go."

"Stop whining and get into the tub," Shadow said, thanking Milan over the link, Shadow's gaze not on Zero, but on the wall tile to his right. Was Zero honestly being shy? The Wilybot couldn't fathom _why_, it's not like their bodies were that detailed.

"Would you at least stop looking at me?" Zero didn't like how scrutinizing his brother was being.

"My gaze isn't even focused on you," Shadow pointed out.

Zero sighed, closing his eyes as he peeled the rest of the ruined suit off, tossing it into a nearby corner, and dropped into the water with a frown. "There. Now go somewhere that isn't here."

"I believe humans start with shampoo," Shadow said, still staring at the wall tile, though there was an edge of impatience in his voice now.

"Shadow, would you get the hell out of the bathroom already? You're making this ridiculously awkward," though Zero had already set a batch of his nanites to start working on his hair. Shampoo was a great idea if all that was wrong with his hair was a little dirt. As it was? He'd rip it out trying to clean it.

"If I leave, Ice will come in. Would you prefer that?"

"No," Zero said, dropping lower into the water. "My hair's going to take a minute, but then again, you should know that. You've been picking around in my head all day, so what's stopping you now?" He rubbed at his arms, a bit of the mess on his arm washing away. "Why are the two of you so horribly concerned anyway? I mean…you and I have the same maker, but…none of you work with a family structure. Or did I get myself listed as subordinate because you don't get that my emotional matrix is a mess more complicated than yours?"

"You're listed as subordinate because you're acting like a unit just barely past the newbuilt stage," like a mopey child, and, honestly, Shadow was offended that Zero felt that the Robot Masters couldn't feel as much as the androids could, but that was a coding explanation for another day. "As for why we're so concerned…I'm disappointed that you haven't put two and two together." Just because he wasn't a Robot Master didn't mean he wasn't included in their social structure, didn't mean he wasn't a valued member. Furthermore, to imply that they shouldn't care because they don't have a family structure in the same sense as humanity?

He sounded a lot like a human when he spoke that way.

Zero snorted as he looked back to Shadow. "Well, if I'm such a newbuilt in your eyes, why don't you_ explain_ why you're so concerned about a unit that you can't even Master? Because I know Father never really cared for family, and the fact that I call him by a familial title is only because of the way I was raised in 21XX, the way I learned to live. So either there's something that I'm missing or Father lied through his teeth about the way you and the others work."

Shadow couldn't be surprised; given what Zero was tasked with, certain details being withheld would have made it easier. "We don't work with a family structure in the sense that our base social structure isn't fostered for the same reasons the human one is. It's not based on maker so much as it is other criteria, though for a newbuilt, the network around the maker is generally the one they enter. Had you been permitted online during that phase, you would have been integrated into our network in short order, ability to Master or no. A human, for example. They can be listed as a 'subordinate unit' to a Robot Master even though they cannot be Mastered. They have close ties to the Master unit and so are protected within that social network by that unit. Break would have taken Rock in even if Break had been a Wilybot to begin with. It had nothing to do with Doctor Light, nothing to do with who their maker is, or was." That was also why Break was a part of the Wilybots' network.

"And that has what to do with how you and Ice are treating me?" He motioned towards the door. "Look what I _did_ to Break. How can Ice even want anything to do with me, _want_ to help me, when I did that to his brother, to the eldest of Light's robots?"

"Were you listening to Ice at all? Look at what he did to humanity, what they all did. They were reprogrammed when that happened. He clearly understands something you_ refuse_ to. That Protocol was not you. You are distinct from it. For such a simple concept, you are having a hard time absorbing it. But because that wasn't you, they will not hold the blame to you, because they _know_ what it felt like, and they _know_ that was not you."

"Break is going to blame me!" Zero exploded. "Were you not there? Did you not _hear me_ telling him to take care of the Omega Protocol? Shadow, Break didn't _want_ to do that, I could see it, but I pushed him. If he thinks that I did that to ensure that the Protocol would activate, that I somehow _knew_, I'm as good as dead once he finishes maintenance anyway!"

"Break knew the risks going in, and it was his decision to make," Shadow said, his posture stiffening somewhat at Zero's outburst.

"Did he, really? You didn't see the look in his eyes when I…when…the Protocol…when I woke up. You didn't see the look he gave me." Zero shook his head, the ends of his hair floating along the water's surface as he moved. "He had no idea, Shadow. My firewalls were supposed to be down. My defense systems were supposed to be _off_. I was supposed to be two systems shy of full shutdown _and I woke up blocking him from the Protocol and initiating an auto-hack!_"

Outside, Ciel was staring at her bathroom door in open shock, and when he heard Zero yell at Shadow a second time, Ice ran for the door, pulling it open and skidding to a stop once inside. "Both of you, calm down," you're scaring the human, and she's such a nice human for once, "Blues isn't going to blame you, Zero." Ice turned and shut the door, his voice still soft as he spoke. "If he was really blaming you, he'd have ordered Rock and himself evacuated after the attack. He stayed. Coming from Blues, that speaks _volumes_," and Zero needed to understand that. "He's not someone that stays in one place for long. _He's still here_. And it's not because Rock is here—had he felt the need to leave, Rock would have gone with him."

"Furthermore, he already evaluated your coding and he understands how Father thought," Shadow added, "He knew that something like this was a possibility, even if the Protocol did manage to surprise him. He told you, before he said anything else about your coding, that your maker—our father—was a very sick man. And he was."

"But the Protocol…" Zero was trying not to scream again, trying to keep his voice low. "I _am_ the Omega Protocol. That is my _base programming_. It wasn't a rewrite. I wasn't reprogrammed. My personality, me, as Zero, is one thing. The Omega Protocol…is me. I can't not think about what I did. I can't say that wasn't me. That was _what was I meant to be_. How…" And Zero curled in on himself, falling silent, running one hand over his hair, a batch of the tangles falling loose.

Ice sighed at length. Perhaps attacking Zero outright, beating the stress out of him, would have been better. Didn't the Wilybots thrive off of that, or something? It was a bit late for that, though, and honestly, Ice didn't want to ruin the halls here just to convince an abject teenager to stop being so difficult. "It's true that Omega was your base programming, but…I heard what happened from Shadow," and Blues wouldn't be sharing any of his files or logs of the incident, thank you very much. "You rewrote your own personality programming. _You did that, Zero_. Not Wily, not anyone else. Don't you think the personality you forged by yourself, for yourself, is more genuinely you than any other?"

Zero looked to the Lightbot, his eyes flickering blue for only a moment before they settled back to their normal black. "I don't remember him. I don't remember who I was, not enough to know with any certainty who I was." He looked down to the water, running his hands over his synth-skin, idly washing away the mess. "All I know is that I made myself Zero. What I did with that, what I made of myself a hundred years ago…it's all gone, fractured, in pieces that I'm not sure I want to recover anymore."

Ice blinked, his brow furrowing at the flicker of color in Zero's eyes, but didn't comment on it. "You have a lot of people around you who want to see you do well," a lot of units that genuinely cared, "Don't shun that." Not everyone gets a supportive base that way. "And even if you don't remember the bulk of your time as an active unit, that's still _you_ in there and not the Protocol, Zero." Ice reached out to tap the android gently on the forehead. "You're not broken, not in a way that can't be repaired. You're not shattered."

"I…" Zero looked to Ice, then Shadow, before falling silent again. "I'm sorry," he said finally.

"Don't be sorry," Ice replied, stepping back. "Your turmoil is understandable, expected, even. What you're going through isn't easy," and Ice understood that, cheerful as his voice sounded. "I'll be outside, I think they're having a new suit brought up for you." With that, the Lightbot slipped from the bathroom again, keeping the worry from his features as he smiled to Ciel.

"Is everything okay?" Ciel asked, looking to the bathroom door. "He sounded pretty upset."

"He'll be fine," Ice said, dusting his snowsuit off, "He's going through a lot right now. I think his emotional matrices are running a bit erratically, though it's probably in response to everything that happened." To have a more 'humanlike' reaction.

And yet, the Robot Masters had been heavily discouraged from having emotional responses to much of anything. Ice supposed it was a good thing and should be seen as a good thing, that the ones in the base were reacting so to Zero's outbursts instead of demanding he be brought offline for examination.

Inside the bathroom, Shadow messaged X, asking if he could send someone up with Zero's armor. It'd be better if Zero walked around fully clothed, so to speak.

Ciel smiled a bit and nodded. "Reploid emotional programming is one of the most intensive parts of their entire construction process. I'm not sure about your setup, seeing as we've…kept our distance since Blues arrived, but with them…" Ciel looked to the bathroom. "Aside from the obvious functional differences between our species, he's doing about as well as we could expect, especially now that someone's dragging him out of his room and forcing him to deal with it. Isolation doesn't do anyone any good. He was a bit of a mess, though. Has he been like that since the incident?"

"From what Shadow said, he made himself messy. That's why I dragged him out. He shouldn't sequester himself, particularly since he's blaming himself for something that wasn't his fault. He'd be having an easier time with his memories intact, but they aren't," and wishing they were wouldn't help Zero any.

Ice didn't provide any input about Robot Master emotional programming. Given the human's outlook on Reploids and artificial life in general, it'd raise a lot of awkward question that, really, would be best saved for another time.

The nanites had finally shot back a report that their work was complete, and Zero leaned back, dunking his entire head underwater for a moment before sitting back up. "Shadow…I…would you mind helping me with my hair?" Now that all the tangles and knots had been cleaned up by his nanites, Zero needed to wash the mess of fluids from the flaxen strands, which, considering their length, it was a lot easier…

"X," he said suddenly. "X used to help me with this when the skirmishes got messy."

"It is a length that would be hard to manage on your own," Shadow agreed and it made him wonder what Wily had been thinking. Perhaps it was supposed to be intimidating? "But was that a new memory?" The second his mind stopped brooding, one unlocked? Well, that should lend weight to Ice's argument. The Wilybot stepped over, grabbing the shampoo bottle and squeezed some onto one hand. He knew how to wash hair; the Robot Masters had to wash theirs occasionally, especially if they did something that involved a lot of dirt or dust and it got under their helmets.

"It was," Zero said. "I'm running a scan now to see if there was anything peripheral to the memory, any satellites or…dammit, why can't I get a date stamp for that memory file?" Zero glared at the wall even as he felt his brother's fingers start to work across his scalp. "Thanks, Shadow," he said after a moment. "I really don't know how you put up with me. I've been sitting on my ass for a week and a half and no one said anything until Ice came by today."

A knock on the door disrupted the conversation, Milan walking in the room, keeping his eyes respectfully diverted as he set a pair of towels and the new suit down on the counter next to the sink. "I forgot to bring the towels in earlier," Milan said before skittering out of the room and closing the door behind him.

"I wanted to give you some time, but once a week passed, I realized you'd need some outside help, but X was adamant that we leave you be until you came out on your own. Ice did not agree with that rhetoric," Shadow didn't expect Ice to agree, even if Elec did remain aloof, so convincing the Lightbot to help him in this effort wasn't very difficult. Rock would have helped, he always wanted to help, but given the situation…Ice was a better choice.

Shadow didn't say anything to Milan when he came in, though he noted how the Reploid was behaving, as though he were walking in on a human bathing.

"X probably remembers a lot of how I used to be, acts on that because he's more familiar with how I was, how he remembers." Zero leaned forward to give Shadow better access to the hair that was trailing along in the water. "I'm starting to wonder if I should start talking to him, going over some of the things he remembers, and seeing if it triggers my memories." He resisted the urge to look over his shoulder, letting Shadow continue washing his hair. "How are Break and Rock doing?" he asked, hands clenching beneath the water. "I…I haven't asked you since the day after, so…"

Shadow hesitated for just a moment, then continued down to the hair further from his scalp, "There is more than just Ice that came here," Shadow began, "The 008 unit, Elec Man, arrived the day after the attack to look after Rock while Break ran maintenance. Break is as well as could be expected," though angry beyond words at the other Robot Masters (that weren't Rock) in the base, "and Rock recovered well from the shock." Especially given that he has his memories back and knows how to contend with what happened.

"What about Break's arm?" Zero asked.

"Ice brought the parts for the repairs today," Shadow said, nodding slightly, "He's fine."

"Probably a good idea for me to keep my distance, though?"

"…Probably, at least from Break." He probably still had Zero massively flagged. He'd have said Rock too had it been the day prior, but now, with all his memories back? No, Rock could handle it and Proto Man would be satisfied that he could hold his own even if Zero did try anything, at least long enough for help to come.

Zero nodded. "Done?" he asked as Shadow pulled away.

"Go ahead and rinse," Shadow nodded, standing up and quickly rinsing his hands off at the sink.

Leaning back into the water, Zero cleaned the shampoo from his hair, running his hands over the long tresses to pull as much water as he could from his hair before picking himself up and sitting on the edge of the tub. "Towel, please."

Shadow handed Zero the towel wordlessly, stepping back into the shadows to let the android do what he needed to.

Catching his hair in the first towel, Zero wound the cloth around his head, securing it before pushing himself from the water and grabbing the other towel, drying off and grabbing for his undersuit. It took a few moments longer before he was able to towel his hair off to a respectable degree, running his fingers through the locks as he looked at his reflection in the mirror.

He looked worlds better, even if he still internally felt like crap.

Ice was letting Ciel show him files on her computer, data about the Elf Wars, detailed histories and carefully-copied first- and second-hand accounts from soldiers and civilians alike of what was happening then. There were some of X's memory files and other files from the Hunters. Ice was mostly quiet as he reviewed and copied the files, not incredibly shocked by some of the more grotesque accounts.

He'd seen war, after all. Lived it, though not nearly so much as Rock.

Zero hesitated for a moment, his hand against the door, before grabbing the handle, the door swinging open, and he stepped out into Ciel's room, moving for the nearest chair to sit down.

He only made it halfway before he was intercepted by Ciel hugging him. She smiled a bit as she released him. "Feeling better, Master Zero?"

Zero nodded mutely before moving for the chair and dropping into it, leaning back in the seat. "Better?" he asked, looking to Ice.

"Much better," Ice nodded his approval. Zero at least _looked_ like he gave a damn about himself one way or the other, which, really, was quite an improvement.

Just then, Elec and X walked in, Elec carrying Zero's armor, the Cyber Elf trailing behind him. They'd been downstairs, working to clean up Zero's thrashed room, and even took the Peng units from the med lab to speed things up. Rock said he didn't require their assistance any longer, so it didn't delay the repairs any.

X moved for Zero immediately. "How are you?"

"Doing alright," Zero said, turning to Elec and bowing his head. "Pleased to meet you, Elec."

Elec nodded to Zero, "It's good to meet you, too," and good to see that Zero was somewhat better off than what Ice initially described. He knew that Rock, at the very least, would have been worried to see what Zero'd been doing to himself. "I brought your armor," the Robot Master continued, making his way to the android. Despite the pieces being a little bulky and heavy, Elec managed to arrange them so that they weren't too much of a hassle to carry. Of course, the weight barely registered to him.

Zero got to his feet and took the offered items, quickly donning the armor. "Thanks, Elec. I'll…I'll do the maintenance on my helmet tonight. I know I dinged that up pretty badly, but Cerveau's got more than enough on his hands, especially if he's been working on my weapons…well, the added sets I gave him the blueprints for." Zipping his vest up, he turned to Ice. "What now?"

Ice and Elec's eyes both widened and although they didn't actually pale, it was clear that something that warranted an 'oh, _shit_' just transpired. "Let's…let's stay up here for a little bit," Ice managed while Elec nodded in full agreement.

* * *

><p>Translations! (New and improved!)<p>

"Verschwinde und lass mich in Ruhe!" - "Go away and leave me alone!"  
>"Was zum Teufel willst du, Ice?" - "What the ** do you want, Ice?"<br>"Und wer zur Hölle glaubst du zu sein, dass du beurteilen kannst was ich brauche?" - "And who the hell are you to judge what I need?"  
>"Du hast keine Ahnung was ich durchgemacht habe!" - "You have no idea what I went through!"<p>

…Angsty teenager much?


	30. Challenging Authority

_And here we have how the Robot Masters work explained in a bit more detail, including a live example! Zero's back on his feet and gets his bearings. Rock does the same, though his realizations aren't quite so sunny. Also, there is some mild language, and there will be language as the story continues, so now you've been warned.  
><em>

_Also-also: I am terrible and forgot to give credit to the lovely person doing our German translations from now on. So thank you, w nymph, for allowing us to stomp out that fail with a vehement passion. I just need to get around to editing previous chapters...  
><em>

_Rockman is copyright Capcom, we are making no profit._

* * *

><p>Rock felt a little bit sick. He read over the status report Blues provided X before even beginning, then double-checked it with what Blues' systems told him. A match, straight down the line. There was a lot more wrong in his body than there should have been. He hadn't heard the full story from Blues, only that they'd been found and brought to a lab in Neo Arcadia, and then Blues took him out of there and repaired him here, in the base.<p>

That was all Blues said.

Looking at Blues' parts, Rock now understood why. These were _his parts_. Rock had never seen anything so vulgar as cannibalizing one unit to save another, but he wasn't stupid. He could put two and two together.

But Rock grit his teeth and began the maintenance, the Peng units chirring softly to him, reassuringly, even as they brought him the next part he needed or removed the old, useless part from the workspace. Nearly everything in his joints needed alignment or tightening, but his buster arm was by far the worst. It was what was injured during the altercation with Zero and, honestly, Rock was more than a little surprised he hadn't heard anything about it over the network.

The base was normally so gossipy, but for this, no one uttered a word. Not a single word.

Rock had to strip the bodysuit from Blues' upper half and pull back the synthetic skin over his shoulder joint, from the pectorals to the trapezius, almost to where a human's serratus would be. It was kind of funny, Rock thought, that he knew so much of human musculature, but there were equivalents of it used in their construction.

The arm had to be completely detached. Much of the inner joint had to be replaced or sanded down to a smooth surface again. The ball joint itself? Was trashed. All of the wires, frayed and broken. Rock had to delve deeper into Blues' torso to reattach the wiring, pulling more and more back as the extent of the damage became apparent. This wound would have been _agonizing_. It'd been ten days and Rock's only consolation was that Blues hadn't been conscious for much of it at all.

Honestly, nearly half of his time was expended on repairing Blues' shoulder, on getting the wiring back together, to get his motion range back up to spec. Once that was done, Rock checked the other shoulder since the skin was peeled back anyway. That needed realignment. He checked Blues' spine. Rock was glad he had a full, professional-grade laboratory tool set in his variable system. He hated the independent tool that they used for realignments. It towered over the lab table, casting strange shadows and, honestly, the grinding of metal on metal when you forced the joints back into place was enough to make him cringe.

Once Rock replaced the parts in Blues' main body and closed him back up, pulled his undersuit back up and on, he turned his attention to Blues' buster. It wasn't physically damaged on the outside, but reports indicated that it'd been shorted out, burnt out in its circuitry. When Rock opened it up, he saw why and how. The teleportation matrix was melted down.

Blues must have tried to escape during the attack.

Really, he knew the matrix would be down in some manner; there was a replacement one in the case, along with other parts, but still. To see it? Rock liked fixing others, but that didn't stop him from cringing at nasty injuries.

Rock was wired in to Blues, so he felt it when he began coming online again and, for an instant, Rock considered vetoing it and instructing Blues to sleep, but no, that would be wrong. He was upset enough as it was. So the younger unit closed up Blues' buster for the moment and waited.

Blues shot straight up on the table, his systems gearing into overdrive. His head was pounding still and while his core was irritable, it wasn't as bad as before. But that meant nothing to Blues at the moment. Angry didn't even begin to cover how he felt right now. Rock was _his_ subordinate unit. Where were they? Not here, they knew they'd be shot if they were here. Over the network, still hidden from the Reploids online, Blues reached for the three other Robot Masters who did this to him.

What the _fuck_ were they thinking, coming here and doing this? What right did they have? '_Explain yourselves,_' Blues roared over each of their links, even as they ducked down and deferred; a fight over Rock wasn't what they wanted, apparently. But they still moved over his head? No. That was _not_ how this works. They didn't have the right to decide what was correct, what was and wasn't against the rules. This was _his_ game, not theirs.

Blues was about ready to jump off the lab table and hunt them down, but a pair of arms wrapping around his waist distracted him.

"Wait, Blues, wait. I'm not done, please lie back down. Your buster—run a scan. You woke up early. I didn't want to make you sleep for longer, so just give me a minute." Rock was pushing over their link, pushing affection and calm feelings toward Blues, showing that he wasn't offended or upset that Ice, Elec, and Shadow did this, so maybe he could calm down a little? Blues was right: they did step over their bounds, but Rock wasn't mad or hurt, really. And this was the only way they could have gotten any repairs in for Blues in a way he'd be anywhere near being okay with.

Blues hadn't even registered until that moment that his buster arm was operational. As an afterthought, he noted that the pain was gone, too. A systems scan reported back that many of his parts that were breaking or worn down were newly replaced. So that's what took them so long to come with Rock's chip: they'd had a shopping list for him, too.

After a long moment, Blues settled back down, scanning the room and verifying that, yes, there was no one in the lab. Not even Shadow. He laid back down, looking away from Rock as he took the buster arm and opened it back up, continuing his repairs.

Rock hoped that this lapse in time would calm Blues enough that he wouldn't aim to dismember the others when he saw them next.

* * *

><p>Zero and X had both noticed the way the Robot Masters had tensed up, though they'd remained quiet. Zero was careful, cautious, as he laid a hand on Elec's shoulder after a moment. "Everything okay?"<p>

X, on the other hand, had opened his links with the Robot Masters, querying all three of his brothers in turn and noticing…

Oh.

After a moment's hesitation, X reached out, sending a tentative link request to Blues.

At least he knew part of why Elec and Ice were so on edge all of a sudden.

"Yeah, we're fine," Elec responded, glancing down to Ice, worried.

"I didn't expect him to take it that way," Ice said, frowning.

Blues raised his head slightly when he received the link request from X, prompting Rock to glance up to him for a moment, though he didn't pause in his motions. After a long moment, Blues accepted the link request to X, though he didn't reach out to fortify it and although he kept his feelings from flooding over the link, straight down on X, he wasn't completely blocking how he was feeling, either. His song on the Harmony was tight with anger and, honestly, it was more closely resembling a Wilybot's song than anything else right now. When Rock reached to him over their link, his signal painted with worry, Blues allowed him to curl up beside him on the network, but his overall demeanor more resembled an animal whose territory had just been invaded. Invaded by something he would not tolerate.

"Take what what way?" Zero asked, looking to X. "Why do I feel like I'm out of the loop?"

"Um…" X looked to his brothers. "Can one of you…explain what's going on?"

Elec let out a breath before speaking, "We went over Blues' head to repair Rock, which is…"

"It was voted on," Ice said, shaking his head. "Blues was overruled."

"Blues is Rock's Master. That's been explained, right?" Elec said, looking to the others. "With children, it is left up to the Master to decide what is best for them. We disagreed." It was a bit of a political move that they did, but for Blues to take it so…

"Challenges must be met," Ice said, "and Blues does not take these things lightly."

"Rock's working on calming him down, but for the time being…_I'm_ not going down there." Hell no. Elec wanted no part of this, he knew what Blues did to challengers.

"You…" Zero looked to Elec and Ice for a moment. "You vetoed a unit's Master's orders to…" He actually sat back down at that, looking at the Lightbots. "What, exactly, of Rock's did you _fix_?" Zero remembered a few of Wily's more _colorful_ rants about Break Man and the issues he had with the unit. The blonde shuddered a bit at the thought.

"His memory," Ice said curtly. "I installed his backup memory chip today."

Zero facepalmed. "You're both so many degrees of screwed if Break finds you."

"We are," Ice agreed.

"I'm not going down there," Elec repeated.

"How is restoring Rock's memory files so bad that you're not willing to talk to Blues?" Ciel asked, looking around the room. "I mean, he needed those files the same way Master Zero does."

"It's not the same, Ciel," Zero said. "Reploid and androids, we operate like humans. We live by _your_ concept of a social structure. For them?" and he thumbed toward Elec, "it works completely different. What they did is…it's like if you've made a point of telling the rest of this base that this room is your sanctuary, that this place is _yours_, and that the computer all your work and files are on is not to be touched. Then, even after all that's been said, someone from security," and Zero had a couple of units in mind, "comes down here, sees how you have things set up, and decides to tool around with them because they feel that things can be improved. Yes, Rock needed to recover his memories, more so even than me, but the way they did it?" Zero shook his head. "It's like overruling your commanding officer. In a military setting, the democracy you may have been familiar with as a civilian doesn't work. It's an autocracy, and when rules are broken, punishment is swift and, if what I remember from their time is any indication…"

He let his last few words hang in the air.

"So…Blues…" Ciel looked to Ice and Elec. "He took this as a personal affront and a…what, a challenge to his authority?"

"He did. And challenges must be met. Our social dynamic…it fluctuates. Blues has remained on top because he can _assert himself_, both off and on the network. He's been on top the entire time because _no one's won_." Elec sighed, looking aggrieved. "If he does, ah, come looking for us, we'll meet him somewhere away from all of you," especially the human.

It really wasn't fair that Shadow could just hide and ride the storm out.

"It may be easier for you to relate," Ice told Ciel, "if you think of Blues and Rock in a parent-and-child relationship for humans, and us, the others, as the community as a whole. Humans don't take kindly to others telling them how to raise their children. We do not take kindly to others telling us how to handle our subordinate units, no matter how _needed_ the influence may be." And to the others, it was a needed intervention.

"But what about the idiom that 'it takes a village to raise a child'? And how does refusing to give those memory files to Rock classify as something better for him?" Ciel really didn't understand how Blues could be reacting so negatively. "Wouldn't it be better for him if it's something as simple as replacing a memory chip for your kind?"

Both Elec and Ice hesitated, both units glanced at one another. "It's not the same thing," Ice said slowly. "A subordinate unit is not a child. While yes, we can overrule if enough of us vote that way, we're still undermining his authority. Rock is _Blues'_, not ours. And…" Ice trailed off, glanced to Elec: how much to say?

"Rock fought in ten wars and countless other skirmishes. I don't think Blues wanted those memories and experiences hanging over him," Elec said. Their disagreement lied therein: which was better for him? In this setting, where a war was brewing, in such a tumultuous place, such a volatile place? Rock needed to be able to _protect himself_. That was how the community voted, at any rate.

"Wait, didn't Blues order a file recovery effort for Rock?" X asked.

"That aside," Zero said, looking to Elec, "You're telling me Break was holding back the war memories when…we're practically in the middle of a warzone as it is. We're a guerrilla organization aiming to take down the Reploid in charge of Neo Arcadia. How was Rock supposed to do anything other than cower in a corner and cry if Break never intended to train him, if something had happened here?" And that didn't even bring up what would have happened if the Protocol had known how to get a hold of Rock. "Don't tell him as much, but I agree with the community vote."

"Blues' plans are always ridiculous until they unfold," Elec groaned; he had no doubt that there'd been a plan. "He's very good at arranging pieces as with a chessboard, then tripping a net. But yes, we agreed with the community vote, too." Obviously.

"That's not the first time that I've heard the term 'subordinate unit' used by you," Ciel noted. "I can tell that something's not connecting for me here, but I'm not sure what."

Zero suddenly lost a bit of the color in his face, and he got to his feet, pulling Ciel toward a far corner of the room. Keeping his voice low, he reminded Ciel of the question she'd asked some time before, explaining to her in hushed tones the exact issue she was having with her understanding of the Robot Masters.

Part of Zero really hoped that Ice and Elec weren't amplifying their auditory receptors.

When Ciel finally returned to her seat a few minutes later, she looked for all the world as if Zero had belted her in the gut. "I'm…I get it a little bit better now," she managed, her eyes failing to hide the shock she was feeling.

Elec and Ice didn't need to have their audio receptors amplified to guess what'd just been divulged. They tactfully ignored the discussion, however. "Blues did order a file recovery effort, the key word being _effort_," Elec said to X's earlier question. "He never intended to restore his backup memory to him in full had Rock's systems never recovered everything."

Milan looked to X then, as if someone had poked him. "Master X, both of your sons have been asking me for some time now what happened. Ice's presence on the net…" and the security officer cast an apologetic look to the unit, "shifted a bit in terms of how much of it we're feeling. They want to know if everything's alright."

"I'm fine," Ice answered, "But I did back off with my presence on the network some," partially because that Ice was public was making Blues even angrier. That and Ice didn't want his worry to communicate over the network: he wasn't certain if the Reploids could sense it, but Rock certainly could and would smell blood in the water.

"He'll probably accept our challenge if we go together," Elec said, not that that was much comfort: all six of them weren't a match for Blues.

"And let you shock me? No thanks," Ice retorted a bit crankily.

Still cloaked, Shadow realized something and shot a quick message off to Harpuia and Phantom, '_Stay out of sight in X's room for the time being. I do not think Proto Man has had a chance to register that you, Harpuia, are in this base, and he may have you flagged as a hostile._'

Both units, huddled on the bed and watching the replay of the sledding race for the umpteenth time, nodded and sent messages of affirmation back along the tenuous link with Shadow.

* * *

><p>It only took another fifteen minutes or so for Rock to finish repairing Blues' buster, but his rage had barely quieted. He wasn't so hell-bent on hunting them down and disciplining them wherever they were any more, but he was still more than intent on meting out their punishments. This was unforgivable. Blues sat up slowly when Rock finally closed his buster and disengaged from the wired link, the child looking down at the floor when he swung his legs over the side of the table and looked Rock over. Blues put a hand on Rock's head, sending a feeling over their link to let Rock know that he wasn't the one Blues was upset with, and Rock stepped forward and wrapped his arms around Blues' middle, relaxing when the older unit let his arm drop to rest on Rock's shoulders.<p>

"There's been enough fighting, enough people are hurting," Rock said. "I'm not hurt, so it's not that bad." It was a bit easier to sway Blues when Doctor Light was still alive because Rock had to live with the doctor then. Now he was solely Blues', and Blues was protective of his things, if nothing else.

He had precious little, after all.

"I won't tolerate their insubordination," Blues calmly returned, sliding off the table, his feet barely making any sound at all when he hit the ground. He kept an arm around Rock, reinforced their link, their bond. Both of them were a bit upset now, and that wasn't even considering the incident with the Protocol.

Rock noted that Blues' firewalls were weakened and that his overall mental status was in the deep yellow, teetering toward orange at times. He needed more time to recover from this, Rock knew, but it had to be time awake now, it had to be conscious healing.

Rock reached up to Blues, leaned into him, and Blues couldn't help a slight smirk, "You're trying to delay it."

"They had to restore my memories to get you repaired," Because Rock would have been too emotional otherwise, too inexperienced and too shaky to do the repairs.

"There were other ways to do it," Like _asking permission to do it_.

"You would have said no and your arm was completely disabled. You needed a lot of parts."

Blues rubbed Rock's back, still immensely irritated, still incredibly angry. "You did not need this." These memories, these scars.

"I'm worried, you still don't feel good." Rock made a point of emphasizing Blues' firewalls over their link. Was he in any condition to be confronting others?

"I'll be fine."

"Not if you don't rest."

"It won't take long."

"They don't have the parts to repair them here."

Okay, that gave Blues some pause. "We can have some sent."

"That's wasteful."

"It's more wasteful to allow insubordination." If they thought they could do as they pleased, they'd take advantage.

"Blues, I…I don't want to fight anymore." Rock trembled a little bit, not looking up to make eye contact. "I'm so sick of it. I don't want to watch them get hurt more than I want to watch you get hurt."

Blues sighed, "This is why I didn't want this," part of the reason why he hadn't sent for Rock's backup. The younger unit cuddled closer, looking for reassurance that no, this would not turn into a big ordeal. But Rock never had to fight Blues' battles, never had to take responsibility for anything Blues did. Blues was the Master here, not Rock.

"Can we just go downstairs for now?" Rock pleaded, and it would have been manipulative had Rock been the sort of unit to use his cuteness to get his way. Except, no, Rock never thought in those terms, was always an open book, never untrustworthy. Blues could feel that over their link, even now.

The older unit sighed, but it was an admission. Yes, they could go downstairs. Rock didn't look up and smile, didn't celebrate this small victory. Worry and concern was all that radiated over their link.

Because now Rock could look at Blues' mental state, could look back on what he saw and heard, and piece it together. Rock _understood_ what happened when the Protocol attacked far better than he had before. This hadn't been an easy few weeks for either of them, and Rock knew that was partly why Blues was being so heavy-handed with Ice and Elec. Really, their timing could not have been worse even if it was the only time they could have come.

Rock made sure the lift was empty when it stopped on the fourth level for them, and there wasn't a single unit in the halls on the way back to their room.

* * *

><p>Milan looked to the units in the room, then to Ciel, "I hate to interrupt what's going on, but it is getting late, so it's probably in Ciel's best interests for her to get some rest. We can continue any discussions in the morning, if the need is there."<p>

X nodded. "That is true."

Ciel looked to Ice then. "Would you like for Milan to take you down to the archives now?"

"Milan will be okay staying here," X said pointedly. "Zero and I can show Ice and Elec where the archives are."

Zero stood then, bowing to Ciel and Milan, "Sleep well, Ciel," he said before moving for the door.

Ciel nodded, "Master Zero…if you don't mind, I'd…I'd like to talk with you again tomorrow."

Zero stopped where he was by the door, resting one hand against the doorframe, and looked over his shoulder. "I'll be up here as soon as I finish my memory log update with Cerveau. I'm over a week behind," and the 20XX memories were going to take a good minute to log, especially because Zero knew he'd have to be careful about what details he did and didn't let the medic know about.

X motioned to Ice and Elec as he moved for the door. "Good night, Ciel," he called out as he followed Zero out into the hallway.

"Sleep well, Ciel," Ice said, waving to her as he stepped over to the door. Elec wished Ciel and Milan a good night as well, following X, Ice, and Zero into the hallway.

X and Zero moved for the lift, Ice and Elec following close behind, and it only took a moment for them to make it to the archives on the third level, X wishing the two units well before heading back towards the lift.

"You think they'll be okay?" Zero asked. "Break isn't going to just sit idly by and let their subversion just…"

X shook his head. "I don't really know," he said, looking toward the ladder that led further down into the base.

"Not today," Zero said. "We'll take the lift. After all this, the last thing anyone here needs is another upset."

The two moved in silence, neither speaking as they boarded the lift again.

Once they hit the sixth level, Zero stopped, looking to X.

"What?"

"Just…I had a memory restore while I was…getting myself back into some semblance of presentable, a memory I had of you helping with my hair. There…you said something in that file, whenever it was, about life moving on and time healing all the wounds incurred, harsh as they may have seemed."

X froze, eyes widening a bit at the thought that the memory file Zero had restored. That one, if it was the one he thought, was only _hours_ after he and Zero had returned from the Final Weapon. After the last ten days, Zero did _not_ need another emotional upset, especially with what the Repliforce incident had cost him.

"Something tells me that wasn't a memory file you're glad I restored," Zero said, frowning.

"I…" X looked to the floor for a moment. "It was and wasn't. I know when I said that, and I know what brought on that comment. I just…if the memory files from then restore…" and he moved towards Zero, wrapping the android in a ghost of a hug, "don't shut me out again."

Zero smiled, returning the motion, careful not to press more than feather-light against the elf. "Don't worry. I think I've had enough of staring at the walls to last me a couple hundred years."

X smiled as he pulled away. "I hope you mean that. I know you've got a lot more locked away in your processor that's going to make you want to punch something…or worse."

Zero shook his head. "Ice said something to me today that really put things in perspective. I just…is it alright if I camp out in your room tonight? I'm not even sure I'll be able to get the lock on my door undone."

"Elec undid the lock," X said. "He and I…well, he straightened up in there while you were cleaning up. Most everything is back in order, but the—"

"The bed's probably still a mess, I know. I'll probably just grab my helmet and come to your room, if that's okay."

X nodded. "It'd probably be for the best. Harpuia's looking forward to meeting you, I'd bet, especially if Phantom's been talking as much as—"

"Harpuia? He's _here_?" Zero looked shocked; so that was what Milan had meant by 'both' of X's sons asking about the Robot Masters earlier. "Okay, it's official—I am not locking myself in my room ever again if I miss this much." And at that, Zero logged back onto the comm and sec nets, frowning at the batch of messages that had been left for him, and quickly set his access to cloaked. "Oh, boy, seems like everyone and their little brother missed me."

"The legendary SA Maverick Hunter Zero? Who _wouldn't_ miss you?"

Zero shrugged, a snarky smirk popping onto his face. "The Mavericks, maybe?"

X couldn't help but laugh.

"Actually," Zero said as they moved towards the rooms, "I'll just grab my helmet tomorrow before I head up to the med lab. I'm probably going to need Cerveau's help getting all the dents out and replacing whatever I might have broken."

"The kids will be happy to see you," X said, smiling as he walked through the door. "One of you mind opening the door? We have company," and X quickly moved out of the way.

It only took Phantom a moment to read the look on X's face and realize who it was, unlocking and opening the door, starting an internal timer to see how long it took Harpuia to react.

It took all of four seconds before X's eldest launched from the bed and half-flew into Zero.

Zero took a few unbalanced steps back before he caught himself, wrapping his arms around the brunet. "Harpuia, I take?" he said.

The Guardian seemed to catch himself then, pulling away from Zero and bowing. "An honor to meet you, Master Zero."

Phantom snorted, fell off the bed laughing, and snorted again before looking at his brother. "Harpy, you are such an oddball! Ten years old one moment and a proper Guardian the next?"

"Oh, shut up," Harpuia shot back over his shoulder.

Zero smirked at X. "If this is what your oldest and youngest are like, I can't _wait_ to meet the middle ones."

"I'm fairly certain they'll be a little more tame than these two," X returned. "You've officially met both of the saber specialists."

"Ah," Zero said, smirking at Harpuia. "So both of you took after me instead of your father."

X's eyes shot wide at the mention, and he quickly diverted his attention to the ground, refusing to make contact with Zero at all.

"Dual sabers for myself, though," Harpuia supplied, "although I'm certain my skills aren't anywhere near as good as yours, Master Ze—"

"Just Zero is fine," he said. "And the same goes for you, Phantom. You're X's _kids_. I think that gives you some leeway with how you address me." Zero rested a hand against Harpuia's shoulder then. "And if you want to get some training in, we'll discuss that after I've had a little time to get myself fully on my feet again. Hopefully, neither of you have a problem with me stealing the pod for the night?"

"Of course not," Phantom replied, getting back up onto the bed. "Harpy and I are at decent charge levels, so one night won't hurt either of us."

"Thanks," Zero said, moving for the pod. "So," he quipped, looking to Harpuia as he plugged in to the pod, "Phantom already got to tell me one of the bedtime stories X told you when you were still newbuilts. You got one for me?"

Harpuia tilted his head. "Which one did Phantom tell you?"

Zero and X both smiled when Phantom started shaking his head, eyes widening.

"You _didn't_!" Harpuia cried. "You little—"

"Oh, come on!" Phantom returned. "You _know_ that was my favorite one!"

"That was _everyone's_ favorite, you annoying…" Harpuia launched for the bed, the two units tumbling ungracefully to the floor as an impromptu wrestling match started between them.

Zero looked to X as the Cyber Elf floated nearer the pod. "Were they always this difficult when it came to hibernating for the night?"

X rubbed idly at the gem on his helmet. "Trust me, it's not just when they're setting up to hibernate. When they're on duty, required to act their age and take responsibility, they're all business. Off duty, though?" X shook his head. "I get to experience the _joy_ of being a parent to newbuilts all over again."

Zero laughed at X's expression. "Well, at least this time, you've got yourself a respectable babysitter."

"We do not need a babysitter!" Phantom and Harpuia cried out in unison, stopping for a moment as they stared at each other, before immediately launching back into each other.

"You break anything," X warned, "and you're repairing it tomorrow. And grounded."


	31. The Healing Process

_We'd like to thank everyone who's reviewed us so far. I honestly was not expecting this story to do quite so well, so to see that, week after week, we have people coming back and really enjoying it is beyond encouraging. And even those of you who have nothing to say, we're still very happy to have you along for the ride. _

_Also, in the last chapter, there was a moment between X and Zero that some readers interpreted as a 'ho-yay' moment. We just want to clarify that yes, it does read a little like that, and it was meant as a jibe at the fact that Midnyght commonly pairs X and Zero in her independent fiction than anything actually serious between the two. This story, while having some serious moments of emotional drama, is not geared, as a whole, toward any romantic sub-plots. X's reaction will be explained at a later point in the story, but it probably won't be what some of you expect._

_This chapter's more world building as the morning comes after a very, very dangerous night, X and Zero get a hint at what happens when someone seriously pisses Blues off, and Rocinolle gives Zero a massive headache. We hope you have some tact somewhere in you, Zero, because if there ever was a time you needed it, that time is now._

* * *

><p>Elec couldn't say he had an entirely great night, which was why he was now in the med lab with Rock and Ice, the two older Robot Masters sitting on lab tables while Rock debated on the best way to go about this. Elec was missing an arm and was holding the dismembered limb across his lap. Ice fared a little worse than Elec, having lost his left leg and arm. He was actually lying down on the lab table, looking at the ceiling, a bit of a grim expression over his young features as Elec and Rock spoke.<p>

"At least it's clean," Rock pointed out, inspecting Ice's arm as the smaller unit glanced sidelong to him.

"It's always clean with him," Elec reminded Rock, setting his own limb down, but still sitting up on the table: Ice was first.

When they first entered, Cerveau offered to help, but Rock told him no, that despite how bad this looked, it wouldn't take that long to repair. Nothing was ruptured too badly and what was bent or warped could be forced back into place.

Though honestly, Rock thought, they may need to arrange for new parts; this kind of fix didn't keep forever.

Zero was cradling his helmet under one arm, headed for the med lab, with X close on his heels.

"You have the specs for your helmet, right?" X said, looking at the damaged armor.

"It's just repair work on the cheek guard. It won't take much to fix…I hope." Zero held the piece of armor, looking at the damage. "I'm still surprised I threw it hard enough to do this."

"I've seen you pissed off before," X said as they entered Cerveau's lab. "Believe me, this is…" X stopped short, looking at the carnage lying on two of the lab tables. "What the hell happened?"

All three blinked and looked to X, but Rock was the one that answered, in an almost apologetic tone, "Blues."

"Blues," X repeated, almost deadpanned. "Blues."

"So," Zero said, leaning closer to X, "did me being pissed off ever end up looking like _this_?"

X could only shake his head. "You knew better than to take it out on the other units." He shook his head. "Blues," he said again. "This is…"

"This," Zero said, setting his helmet down and looking at Elec's arm, though he kept a respectful distance away, "was Blues being _merciful_."

Rock was looking worried now and put Ice's arm down, though Zero was right: this _was_ Blues being merciful. "I calmed him down a lot last night," he admitted.

"He didn't get us that badly, so don't feel bad, Rock," Elec told him, sending a reassuring feeling over the link to the younger unit. Well, he _did_ get them badly, but he'd also gotten them worse before. So middling severity? Blues could have done more to disable their weapons, make them unable to move, but only some limbs were removed. The Wilybots usually got it worse than Blues' 'siblings' did.

"This is still…" X moved closer to his brothers, looking at the damage. "I'm guessing whatever sensory receptors you have in the area have already been shut down?" even as his halo shifted to a steady reddish glow.

"Of course," Ice said, blinking as he scanned X, sensing the shift in his energy as he queried X's systems about what was going on.

"It really won't take long to fix," Rock said, shifting his arm into his lab array, "Blues knows how to do it to make clean breaks." Through experience, Rock knew.

It was then that Zero noticed the way Rock was speaking. He'd known since the day prior that they'd replaced Rock's memory chip, restored all of the old files, but…

Zero noted just how _drastic_ a change there was in the little Robot Master. The way he carried himself, the tone of his voice. Smirking, he ran his hand along the busted cheek guard of his helmet, wondering for a moment if the change would be as noticeable when his own memories restored. "Cerveau," he called after a moment, "can I get a hand? I need to do a minor bit of repair work on my helmet."

"Of course," Cerveau said, coming over to Zero, no doubt glad for the distraction from the somewhat distressing scene playing out on his lab tables. The medic inspected the cheek guard, leading Zero over to one of the worktables to begin repairs. "This one's pretty basic; want me to show you how, Master Zero?"

On the other side of the room, Rock had climbed up onto one of the lab stools to get a better look at Ice and was reattaching his brother's leg, welding the broken metal back together and replacing some of the broken or stripped screws in the joint. Really, the break could have been a lot messier, could have been a much more involved repair. This kind of clean break could almost be repaired out on the field.

"It'd be appreciated," Zero said, "though I shouldn't need to deal with a repair like this in the near future, it's still good for me to know how, just in case."

X moved closer to Elec. "And this is normal for Blues when someone gets him mad?" This had to be one of the few times in his life he was glad he didn't have a physical body, at least for now. He was going to have to spend a good bit of time with the Lightbots and Zero before they took back Neo Arcadia just to make sure that he knew how to steer _very clear_ of Blues' bad side.

That he'd stopped using vehement screaming as a means of getting through to his eldest brother probably helped a great deal in that regard.

"Elec," X said, looking to the Robot Master, "do me a huge favor and make sure Blues doesn't know about the electromagnetic field thing with me. Just in case I do something to irk his nerves."

Rock frowned up to X then, "X, Blues isn't going to hurt you. I told you…twice already, right? Blues really likes you." The Robot Master moved to Ice's arm as he spoke, " He just…you two made him really upset," and Rock didn't sound like he was chiding Ice or Elec, just stating the facts, "And, well, it _was_ a challenge."

"I know," Elec said. "We were kind of asking for it."

"Still," X said. "Whether or not he likes me, I've made my fair share of mistakes when trying to relate to him."

"First mistake being trying to relate with him," Zero said, "Although I can't fault you for trying."

X looked to the android. "You know, it's odd to hear you talk about him as if you're more aware of his past than—"

"I'm aware of what Wily told me of Break, and what I heard back then…" Zero looked pointedly at the three Robot Masters in the room. "Well, I don't think I need to elaborate. Nor would Rock appreciate it much if I did."

"Please, don't," Rock said quickly, pausing in his work on Ice as the other two Robot Masters' eyes widened some. Rock had to pointedly keep his feeling in the Harmony neutral to avoid alarming Blues, who was monitoring him closely. "It's…that's nothing that I want following us here, into this time." Rock wanted Blues to actually be able to _heal_ for once, wanted him to be able to move past that and let go of that old pain, those old fears, that intense paranoia that resulted.

Though was it paranoia if it was completely justified? Rock wasn't certain.

"No," Zero said, looking to Rock, "I'm more than aware the damage that could cause, and Break already has enough of a reason to have a beef with me, regardless of who did what and what happened to whom. Besides, it's been three centuries, and after everything you've been through?" Zero shook his head. "This is a time for new beginnings, for things to start over with a clean slate, especially now that things…have advanced the way they have." Zero smiled at Ice. "And thanks again for yesterday. It really made me think and get my head back to right."

Ice smiled back, nodding softly to Zero, but didn't dare move too much: Rock was still working on his arm.

Rock smiled as well, thankful that Zero wouldn't make this situation any worse than it was and, really, Blues had been through more than enough in the past few weeks. They didn't need more dirty laundry aired out. "Thank you, Zero," Rock said, and he really meant it.

Zero turned his attention back to Cerveau's work on his helmet, watching the medic and taking note of the work he was doing.

Then, as an almost-afterthought, "Does anyone know what happened to my saber and pistol after Shadow took them?"

"I think he probably still has them," Elec said, glancing to Zero. "I can try messaging him if you want," the Lightbot offered, though he wasn't certain the Wilybot would respond to him.

Of course, Shadow always responded to Blues, and Elec and Blues were magically back on speaking terms this morning, so that could work, too.

"Never mind," X said, "I linked to him same time as the rest of you when I got here this morning," and the elf sent off a message to the ninja, hoping that at least he had been spared Blues' wrath.

Unlike Elec and Ice, Shadow had several advantages he'd pressed. One was that he was damn hard to locate when he was hiding. He hadn't come out at all the previous night and, honestly, avoided being in the same room as Blues, even in the shadows.

The Lightbot could sense him, even more so when incensed.

The other, and more important, advantage he pressed was that he technically had nothing to do with what they did with Rock; that was an issue for within the Lightbot network. Certainly, Shadow helped incapacitate Blues, but that was to get him repaired, not to prevent him from reaching Rock.

The third advantage was that he'd actually woken Blues. The elder Robot Master would have slept through the ordeal and, honestly, it'd have been even worse if he'd awakened to Rock being 'repaired' and _no one alerted him_.

And so, as long as Shadow remained out of sight and out of the way, he got to keep all of his limbs. The Wilybot found this arrangement to be quite agreeable and thus, here he was in one piece, answering X's query.

Ah, of course he still had the weapons. He still did double-check Blues' location before emerging.

Just because he'd escaped thus far didn't mean it'd continue that way indefinitely, even if he was fairly certain he was out of the danger zone now.

The Wilybot slipped out of one of the shadows in the corner of the room, near some of the unused lab equipment, Zero's pistol and saber in hand as he stepped out of the corner, turning and looking to Ice and Elec.

Well, at least the breaks were clean.

"Hey, Shadow," Zero called out, looking up for a moment before looking back to Cerveau.

"I have your weapons here," the ninja said, and made his way silently over to Zero, handing the saber over first, then the pistol.

"Thanks," he said, holstering both items and holding back from hugging his brother. He was happy to see that Shadow had avoided the unbridled wrath of the pissed-off Lightbot. "You might want to head back for now, just in case Break is busy plotting your imminent dismemberment and waiting for you to slip up."

X rolled his eyes. "I don't think Blues needs to do any more dismembering than he already has."

Zero turned to X for a moment, then shrugged. "Better to be safe and out of the way?" Not that he had any idea what Break was thinking at that moment.

Shadow smirked, though his mask hid it, and he stepped back, once, twice, then shimmered out of view when his armored boot made contact with the shadow the table was casting on the floor. "I think that Break has been satisfied for the time being."

"Shadow didn't do what he's mad about," Ice said, testing out his newly-reattached arm. "This was our move, not his. Blues' feeling on the Harmony is back to normal," well, mostly normal, he was still pissed, "and he won't punish us twice for one transgression." It would be counterproductive.

Zero took the helmet from Cerveau once the repairs were completed, running a thumb over the cheek guard. "Well, that's definitely a couple steps up from a repair I could manage in a field, but okay. Thanks," and Zero lowered the helmet over his head. "Strange how I feel so much better with all of this back on now." And he rubbed at the cheek guard again, eyes half-closing after a moment, the look in his eyes as if something had disturbed him.

"You okay?" X asked. He'd seen the shift in Zero's body language almost immediately.

"Yeah," Zero said. "Cerveau, I'll be back later to update the memory recovery logs. Send a message when Rock's done here," and the blonde turned for the door and walked out.

X hovered in place, looking toward where Zero had been only a moment before, confusion marring his features.

Rock looked up from where he'd begun with Elec, confusion flitting across his features as he looked between the other units in the room. When he was done here? Was Zero…

Rock looked back to Elec, taking a steadying breath before continuing his work. He knew that Zero was still upset about that incident, the same way Rock and Blues were both upset. Zero needed his time, his space, too.

Though honestly, Rock wasn't sure what to think anymore. He wanted to trust the unit, but at the same time…

Maybe Blues had rubbed off on him a bit.

"I still…I can't see how taking you two halfway apart constitutes merciful or a suitable punishment," X said, moving over to Ice as the unit got to his feet. "Is he at least feeling any better? And not just in terms of the situation with Rock."

Honestly, a demonstration over the network would be far more painful and humiliating to the Robot Masters; physical altercations were less messy, though Rock thought he understood why X disagreed so much.

X also didn't know what Blues did to units he genuinely disliked, and, honestly, Rock would prefer to keep it that way.

"His…" and Rock trailed off for a moment. "He's more stable now," he finally said, stepping back from Elec to turn and look to X; as Blues' subordinate unit, Rock could provide the most comprehensive assessment of the three in the room. "His physical side is faring much better with the repairs," and that made Rock think of just whose parts had been used in Blues to begin with. "Mentally, though, he really hasn't improved by much."

Had Rock still been in newbuilt status, Blues would not have allowed him from the room. At least this way, the older Robot Master was satisfied that Rock could assert himself.

"Still repairing?" X said, tapping against his helmet as he looked to Rock.

Rock nodded slightly, "He has to redo his firewalls and defensive systems from the ground up," since the old ones were breached, "But…well, trust doesn't just grow back." And Blues had very little of it to spare to begin with. Honestly, there was a low chance of Blues being social to begin with, but now?

They were lucky Blues hadn't evacuated Rock and the other Robot Masters.

"I'm guessing he's not much in the mood for company, either." And that said nothing of Rocinolle, who'd been found passed out on her workbench two days prior, systems having dropped her into an emergency hibernation to keep her charge levels from going too low, because she'd been working so hard on getting the mechaniloids set for when Blues finally decided to visit her lab again.

Rock blinked. "I don't think he'd mind if you came by." When Rock left the room to go and help put Ice and Elec back together, Blues had just dropped down onto the couch and began working on his firewalls, leaving his old setup active as he began programming a wholly new array. Rock would be surprised if he'd budged an inch in the two hours it'd been since.

X had been about to mention that he'd been referring to Rocinolle when he'd mentioned company when a screech echoed through the hall, a Condoroid until banking into the room and squawking again when it saw Rock, landing next to Elec on the exam table as it loosened its hold on a small box in its talons. The bird mechaniloid hopped a bit on the table as it looked at Rock, tilting its head a few times before cawing softly at him, leaning down to nudge the box.

"Is that Gregory?" X asked, looking at the unit.

Rock smiled and reached up to pet the Condoroid, placing his other hand over the box in a gesture of acceptance. He opened a link with the unit, commending it on a quick delivery when he saw the overall flight time. Really, they were flying much better now. "It is," Rock said as he looked down to the parcel, then opened it. "Oh, it's my gloves!" Rock sounded happy to have them, clearly excited even if his newbuilt self would likely have been bouncing around the room.

Elec couldn't help smiling, "You had gloves like Blues' made?" That? That was adorable.

"I tried his on not too long ago," Rock said, already putting the new pair on, "They don't inhibit motion much at all."

"Well, they're thinner than the armored gloves," Ice pointed out, leaning forward to look.

"The gauntlet is also an extension of the unit's systems," Elec corrected; it wasn't a glove, it was the hand, essentially.

"I didn't realize we'd even forgot to go get those," X admitted. "I wonder how long Loceida waited to send them, though it looks like she did a really good job."

Gregory cawed again before taking to the air again and flying out of the room.

"Did Rocinolle code that one, or was that one of Blues'?" X asked before his eyes went wide with realization. "Sheridan!" he blurted, looking to Ice, then Rock.

Rock's eyes also became round and he turned to Ice, then stopped short, remembering he had to complete Elec's repairs before anything else. Quickly, he completed the repair, though not going so fast as to threaten quality, and began speaking quickly. "That's right! Ice, Elec, we need to get down to Rocinolle's lab! There's something I want to show Ice!"

Elec and Ice blinked, but Elec slid off the table, his padded boots making only a soft sound when he hit the floor. Ice summoned his Peng units back to his side and Rock grabbed Ice by the wrist, pulling him toward the door. "Rock, what is it?" Ice blinked; Rock wasn't even letting him get a good read on him over the Harmony.

He really wanted it to be a surprise.

X moved quickly behind his siblings, trailing behind them as he returned Ice's query with a negative response: he was _not_ telling the Robot Master anything more about this 'Sheridan' unit until they made it down to the floor below them and into Rocinolle's lab. "Rock, I'm going to run ahead to let her know she's about to have company," X called, dropping through the floor as the three waited for the lift, moving quickly to Rocinolle's lab.

The mechanic looked up the minute X flew into her lab. "Master X!"

"Where's Sheridan?"

"In the back room hanging out with a few of the Shellcrawlers and a Yadokroid, why?"

X smirked. "You're about to make Ice the happiest Robot Master ever. Leave Sheridan back there for now, we'll call him out once Rock and the others get here."

"Is Blues-sensei coming with?" She sounded hopeful.

"At the moment, I don't think so," and X didn't bother sending a query across the link with his eldest brother.

Rock was more dragging Ice than leading him. It was amazing how well Rock could book it when he really wanted to get somewhere, and he was bouncing in place as they waited for the lift, Elec trailing a bit behind the two smaller units. Rock's feeling in the Harmony was all glee again and it was having a positive impact on Blues' overall mood.

The lift couldn't go down fast enough and the second it stopped, Rock began pulling Ice along again, half running, half walking to Rocinolle's lab. Rocinolle bowed to them when they entered, Ice and Elec looking around curiously as Rock pulled Ice over, "Rocinolle, these are my older brothers, Ice and Elec," though Rock had no doubt that Rocinolle recognized them from the sledding memory.

"An honor to meet you both," she said, smiling a bit at the thought of the memory file that had introduced these two to her before they'd even arrived. "Now?" she asked, looking to X.

The Cyber Elf nodded, smiling, practically beaming.

Rocinolle turned toward the doorway leading into the back room that a number of the smaller ground units had turned into their 'base camp' and called out, "Sheridan, come out here! You have visitors!" though she had to catch herself from saying any more, knowing the unit's connection to one of the Robot Masters currently in her lab.

Ice and Elec both froze when Sheridan came into view, the Met unit pausing to register the two Robot Masters, then the link between it and its Master flared to life after centuries of no contact, and the little unit made a beeline for Ice. Ice's eyes were wide, barely able to believe it despite what he was seeing, despite the link. This was…this little one was _his_. Sheridan cheeped up to Ice, his two Peng units cheeping in return, in reply to the Metool, and Ice bent down to pick the unit up, hefting it the same way Blues and, later, Rock had. Inspecting it, confirming it. "This is…how? How did…how did this little one survive?" Ice voice was tremulous, memories replaying in his mind's eye as he turned his gaze to Rocinolle, no small amount of awe communicated in the little Robot Master's eyes.

And they'd named it, the way one would a pet, the way humans would their children? Early on, such behavior was discouraged to the point where it was something that merited being taken offline for maintenance, so the First Numbers quickly adapted and got into the habit of naming their units over the Harmony and nowhere else.

Calling them only in a place that was untouchable by the humans, in a place the humans couldn't sully, for their protection and their units' protection.

"I found him in the city before I was ordered retired, brought him with when the Resistance found me, and…Blues-sensei and Rock both helped me to get him back online. There…there are a lot more in the city still," and Rocinolle's expression was one of sorrow, knowing that Sheridan wasn't the only Mettaur that risked being abandoned once it shut down, lost to the bowels of the city because no one knew how to maintain them. "They've…always been there."

"There's more?" Ice's voice was soft, still a bit tremulous, but this time at the thought of all of those little ones, abandoned and alone. Uncared for. He wanted to get them, and he knew that Elec, Rock, Shadow, and Blues all felt the same way.

Well, they were going to take the city, weren't they? Recovering the little ones was going to be a priority, then.

Rock was petting one of Ice's Peng units when a swath of cloth covering one of the worktables caught his eye. "Rocinolle, what's in here?"

The Reploid's eyes went wide, and she shook her head. "It's…it's nothing, Rock. I started a side project in between recoding the units here, but I'm not…" she'd have said that she wasn't done if the only thing holding the project back was her being unwilling to activate the robot. "I've got to check over the coding before I activate her. She's…I built her from the ground up, but it's nothing you need to concern yourself with. I just wanted to test my skills, see how good I've gotten since Blues-sensei hasn't been here to monitor my work, and I've been over the coding at least three times on all the active units and there's a ton of questions I have about recoding a few of the aquatic units and…" She stared blankly ahead for a moment, as if catching herself, and then tried to move for the table before Rock pulled the cloth from the mechaniloid beneath it.

She was a moment too late.

Rock smiled when he saw the unit, moving the cloth aside and reaching for the small unit, pulling it off the table to look at it. "Cute!" It was a yellow-orange cat unit, its eyes closed while deactivated. "What did you name this one?" He turned to Rocinolle, his face lit up in an adorable smile.

"I…I…" She looked half-panicked, falling back a step. "I didn't," she finally managed, her voice barely above a whisper. "Blues-sensei hasn't been feeling good, so I thought I might put together a unit for him to keep him company until he was feeling better, but the Garm are far too big, so I tried to think of another house pet classification that would have worked and figured that he'd be okay with having a cat, but I haven't given it a name because I…" She looked to the floor then. "I wanted Blues-sensei to name her. It's his unit."

X actually blinked a few times before turning to look more fully at Rocinolle. "I'm…going to hazard that I heard more in that last statement than you intended, and part of me is a little…I'm confused." He moved closer to Rocinolle, moving so that he was looking up at her. "You didn't do that just because Blues isn't feeling well, is it?" and he kept his voice respectfully low. "Rocinolle, am I…am I hearing a bit of your emotional matrix bleeding into…with _Blues_?"

Rocinolle bit her lip, refusing to look up as she nodded, an almost imperceptible bob of her head.

Oh, _wow_. X had _no idea_ how to respond to that.

Zero _really _needed to get in here and liaison again. Where _was_ he anyway?

Rock's eyes were wide, "It's a gift?" Rocinolle was giving Blues a new unit as a gift? If at all possible, Rock's smile became wider as he reached to Blues over their link, almost barreling into him on the network, an excited ball of glee and 'I have good news!'. Almost as an afterthought, Rock realized that Rocinolle probably hadn't connected that by telling him, she may as well have told Blues.

Because there were no secrets between the two units.

'_Tango has a little sister._' Rock's voice was shaky with excitement, even over the link. '_Please come upstairs?_' Rock wanted Blues to see: the unit looked ready to be turned on and it was only Rocinolle's hesitation that kept it from being activated.

To say that Blues was startled by the gesture would be a vast understatement. A feeling like shock ran through his systems—outside of Rock or Roll (and now X), he was _not_ used to random kindness. His first feeling was a defensive one: such things were usually thinly veiled transactions, but Rock quickly launched into that feeling, pushing circumstantial data into Blues' systems to dispel that theory.

It still took a lot of debate to convince Blues to even consider coming up, so when the older Robot Master did agree—at length—Rock actually bounced in place a bit, unable to contain his enthusiasm. "He's coming up, he said!" Rock could not wait, and he was hugging the unit, still bouncing in place.

X really needed something to ram his head against at this point. Blues was on his way up here? With Rocinolle as she…

And Zero talking to her was no longer an option, at least not until after Blues had left, probably with the little feline unit in tow.

"Rocinolle," he said, and his voice retained the commanding tone he'd developed working with the Maverick Hunters even as low as he was speaking. "Do _not_ bring this up with Blues right now. There's been far too much on his plate recently and I don't need this causing any more of an issue with him. I can't go into any detail, but _please_, for everyone's sake, if Blues asks, just tell him it's a gift to help with his recovery and as a sign of your progress with the coding."

"Master X," she said, looking up now, "I don't—"

"Right now, the best person for you to talk to would be Zero, so I'll make sure someone gets him here _after_ my brother leaves. I believe I informed you after the attack that Zero was directly involved, so I do _not_ want to have the two of them in room together right now. Just…listen to me, okay? Trust my judgment on this, and I'll make sure things are…that this gets explained as soon as they can be. Okay? Can you do that for me? For Blues?"

Rocinolle only hesitated a second before nodding. "Yes, sir," she replied, her voice still no more than a whisper.

Rock was still hugging the unit, but moved closer to the front of the lab, the little Robot Master incredibly reluctant to put it down for even a second. His line with Blues was very, very active, both units sending continual status reports and updates across the line, constantly checking on one another's well-being.

When Blues did finally show up, he looked worlds better than he had the previous day, before his repairs, and the sunglasses were hiding the exhaustion showing plainly in his eyes. He was still using his old firewalls and, honestly, it felt like sitting with your back to a broken pane of glass after the sniper already shot through it—_several times_.

Rock had been pushing on Blues, throwing up his own defenses to try and fortify until Blues could rebuild, but until then? That sickening, paranoid feeling would not leave his systems.

The second he caught sight of Blues, Rock bounced up to him so rambunctiously he nearly ran into the older unit, happily pushing the little mechaniloid to him, and Blues had to put a hand on the child's cheek and chide him over their link: this was Rocinolle's gift to give, was it not?

Rock's eyes widened and he flinched slightly, flushed with embarrassment. He turned to Rocinolle. "I'm sorry, Rocinolle, I should have let you show it to him!"

"It's okay," Rocinolle said, smiling despite herself at how adorably excited Rock was being about the little unit, and she bent down to take the deactivated unit from Rock, hefting it into her arms in a way that was an almost-natural position before she approached Blues. "I…I didn't name her yet. I built her for you because I thought you needed company, but…she's waiting for you to trigger her initialization." She looked to Blues then: did he want to activate the unit or take it from her before activating it?

Blues wasn't entirely certain how he felt about this. It wasn't that he wasn't willing to accept the gift, and he had no reason to feel an aversion to Rocinolle, but he felt like…

This felt familiar, somehow, even though he couldn't place it no matter how hard he scoured his memory banks. It was putting him on edge.

Blues also didn't understand why Rocinolle hadn't initialized the unit on her own, didn't understand why she was behaving so strangely. Well, he never had any issues activating units before and he wasn't about to start now. Blues reached to the unit, feeling the flicker of power running through it, and ordered it online.

Coming online slowly, the feline's ears twitched a bit, the unit stretching and panicking a bit when its paws didn't register anything beneath it, but as a hand ran gently over its back, it settled, turning dusty copper eyes up to the Reploid petting it. Looking around the room, it stretched in Rocinolle's arms again, gaze turning slowly to the unit closest it.

And meowed at Blues.

Blues couldn't help the slight smirk creeping over his lips as he reached to take the cat from Rocinolle, lifting the unit easily—it was lighter than was standard for Robot Master subordinates—and let the kitten relax in his arms as he forged a link to it, a tickle of amusement brushing through his mind when he felt Rock doing the same, excitedly greeting the kitten.

Blues was the one established as Master, though.

The first thing he did was check the coding, and not even because Rocinolle coded it—it was a programmed compulsion in them to triple-check that all was well, to be absolutely certain that those in their care were well looked after. He checked Rock's often enough. A feeling of approval settled over the Harmony when he determined that all was well with the unit.

It took him a moment to remember that, as a Reploid, Rocinolle wouldn't be able to read him over the Harmony and with so much turned off, he was constantly maintaining a poker face. It was a kind gesture, so he supposed he could be kind in return, even if it felt a bit like he was donning a mask. He activated his human interface protocols, allowing the programming to run in the background as he turned his gaze to the Reploid who, he noted, was still watching him with a strange expression on her face. "Thank you for this, Rocinolle. You did well."

Rock was beaming, reaching up to pet the kitten, one hand grasping Blues' coat near the hip, looking more like the newbuilt he'd been the day before than a seasoned war veteran. He was delighted with the link, delighted to find how affectionate a unit this one was, and that made him want to play with her all the more.

"Thank you, Blues-sensei," she said, careful to keep her voice even. "I wasn't sure if you'd like a cat, but it was the only thing I could think of that would be small enough to not be an inconvenience or take up too much space," and with five Robot Masters in the base? She was a little afraid that it was starting to feel a bit cramped in Blues' quarters, even with Shadow's unique abilities taken into consideration.

"A cat works well," Blues agreed, content to hold the kitten as she began purring. Rock was practically purring as well, having cemented himself to Blues' side, half hugging the older unit and half petting the cat.

It reminded Blues of Tango, in all honesty, even without Rock's earlier reference to the independent little unit.

Rocinolle nodded, smiling a bit, as she moved away from Blues, turning her attention back to her other projects. She was really trying to hold back from asking what he was going to name the cat. And keeping herself from saying anything more to Blues, X's warning still ringing in her ears.

The kitten wriggled a bit in Blues' arms, trying to snuggle closer to the unit. Her tail swung back and forth in slow, lazy arcs as she rubbed her head along his coat. Meowing, it turned its attention to the smaller unit that was petting it, purring lightly and moving her head closer to the hand, wanting attention, even if it was coming from a unit that wasn't registered as her owner.

After a moment, the kitten began to get restless, worming out of Blues' arms and jumping to the floor, rubbing against one of the robot's pants legs and meowing before darting over to Rock and repeating the motions against his pants leg. Purring, she pushed herself onto her hind legs, forepaws kneading against the side of Rock's leg. Her lower legs kicked out a bit as Rock picked her up, but she quickly nestled down into his arms, purring a bit louder as Rock continued to pet her.

She looked up to Blues again, meowing at him, as if asking if it were okay to stay with the unit that was petting her.

Rock looked up to Blues, thinking the same thing as Rocinolle in regard to the kitten's name. "What are you going to name her?" he asked, cuddling the cat in his arms, still petting her, more than delighted with this new addition to the network.

And of course, anything that made Rock happy made Blues happy, so his overall approval of the situation was only increasing as time went on. The older unit took a moment to consider, but they did already have a theme going on with names in the Light network, even if the Reploids here weren't privy to it. Blues liked the references, he liked music, so he had no qualms about keeping with the theme. "Minuet," he decided after going over a list of probably names in his head.

Elec, Ice, and Rock smiled; they understood the reference, in-joke though it was.

Rocinolle smiled, though she continued on with her work, hands idly moving over the unit she was doing physical maintenance on. Maybe after she spoke with Zero, this entire situation would make more sense.

Right now, she was an emotional ball of confusion, though she did her best to keep that from showing.

X smiled as well. "She's adorable," he said, looking at the little mechaniloid currently snuggling into Rock's embrace.

Rock nodded, his head bobbing as he stepped back to Blues. It was evident over the Harmony how pleased the older Robot Master was right now, but he needed to get back to what he'd been doing before: this was about as much as he could stomach right now.

Rock blinked, but sent to X, '_I think we're going to go back downstairs now. He…he doesn't want to be up and around before he finishes rewriting his defensive programming,_' so it said a lot that Blues even came. Pleased as he was, his stress levels were elevated now and even Ice and Elec were becoming a bit concerned.

Not that any of them could blame him. How secure could anyone feel behind a shield that'd already been broken through? It'd be best to let him finish with his defenses then worry about integrating him back into day-to-day life in the base.

'_Alright,_' X said, saying goodbye to the two over the link as they walked from the room. As an afterthought, he asked Rock to let him know when they'd made it downstairs, under the pretense that he wanted to make sure they completed the trip undisturbed.

After about two minutes, Rock sent that message to X, letting him know they were downstairs in Blues' room now.

Ice had his Met on his lap now, having hopped up to sit on one of the worktables, the unit playing some sort of hiding game with itself, ducking down under its helmet every so often. "I have a question," the unit began slowly, checking the Met's coding over—he could tell it'd been repaired, probably by Blues, and he was adding small edits in here and there. "Why did you name this unit? I noticed that the mechaniloid that brought Rock's gloves had a name, too."

"Why wouldn't I?" Rocinolle asked. "Most of the mechaniloids here are like pets for us, and the Mettaur…well…I didn't want to keep calling him 'it' or 'the Mettaur', so I picked a name that had a nice meaning, the same way Ciel provided us with names after the Resistance took us in."

Ice nodded, "We assign unique designations to each unit, but they're not spoken words. There's not really a translation for it off of the network we use—it's separate from this base's networks—but I've never seen…I've never seen people name them before. It's nice."

Rocinolle nodded. "Everyone needs a name. Numbers and codes, stuff that ties you down to the machine that made you? It's…it's just the production line, the reason you were made. A name, though? To be known as 'Rocinolle' instead of 'Security Maintenance Unit nine-four'?" Rocinolle shook her head. "It makes us real, makes us _matter_, to the people around us. That extends to our mechaniloids, too, even if I'm still trying to come up with names for a bunch of them."

Ice supposed the DLN line was fortunate in that they were all handmade. Doctor Light built them, not his plant. Her words left a sort of bittersweet feeling in the Robot Master, however, though he knew he couldn't tell her why. "We were all given a serial number, but our names are directly linked to our designation. There were very few units whose names weren't an indicator of function."

The mechanic looked up, brow furrowing, and she looked a little scared. "I hope I didn't say that in a way that was offensive. I…I simply meant that…our designations…we weren't given names outside of our designations because Copy X doesn't want to see us as people. He views us as resources that need to keep the city together to preserve the humans, but the minute any of us let our personality or emotional matrices actually have a bearing on our function? My desire to learn coding instead of security systems maintenance is what got my Order of Retirement verified."

Ice and Elec's eyes widened and the units became very still, clearly sickened by what they were hearing. A race, forced down into thinghood, objectified, to benefit humanity… "I'm sorry to hear that," Ice finally managed, shifting the Met in his lap.

"Ciel showed us archived data on Neo Arcadia, on the state the city's in due to the Copy's reign. From what Blues and Shadow said about the security there, it should be easy to disable them and take the city." Those orders wouldn't be going out much longer. "There's a lot wrong in that city that could be solved without killing. Once those problems get solved, everything will fall into place." There'd be enough energy, for one. Elec could not believe that there was something wrong with that plant that could not be fixed. There was _no way_ that was the best it could run: he was certain something was going on behind the scenes. They just needed to root the rat out and poison its nest.

X was quick to flood the links he had with Ice and Elec with comfort, feeling their reaction to the mechanic's words.

"Hey," Zero said, sticking his head in the door, "thought I heard you guys chatting in here. I miss anything?"

X looked like Zero showing up then could not have been more perfectly timed. Waving the unit over, X pulled him aside, a few quick words exchanged between them (hopefully) out of earshot of the Robot Masters.

When X finished, Zero's immediate response was to turn around and _stare_ at Rocinolle. For a _good long while_.

The Reploid shook a bit under the android's gaze. "Master Zero?" she asked.

Zero raised a hand, signaling that he needed a minute, and quickly pulled his helmet off, setting the armor down on a nearby table before walking to the nearest wall. Pressing his hands against the cool metal for a moment, he exhaled before his head made swift contact with the wall, and he groaned a bit, though not in pain.

Elec and Ice were both watching this spectacle unfold with wide eyes, the two units exchanging glances: was everyone in this base absolutely _insane_? Both units reached toward X over the link: there was no doubt the android knew what was going on, so please divulge. "What's going on?" Elec hazarded asking aloud, his gaze flickering between Ice and the three Reploids in the room.

Zero groaned again, internally debating if a second hit to the wall would make his processor scream a little bit _less_ at what X had just bombed him with. It was worth a try, anyway.

Another firm hit against the wall and Zero called out, "It's nothing either of you would _want_ to know."

"Zero, I really don't think that kind of response is warranted," X said.

"No, it is," Zero assured, looking toward X before turning to the two Robot Masters. "Out of all of you…all the units still listed as active, and…" He stopped himself. "You know what? I want everyone except Rocinolle out of this room right now. This already stands as one of the oddest moments in the very short span of time that I've had my 20XX memory files, so I'd like to make this as…_not_ awkward as possible, so please. Give me a few minutes, let me talk to Rocinolle, and if things work out in a way where I'm not beating my head in for the way I handled it, I may just clue the rest of you in." And he looked to Rocinolle, who was blushing seven shades of embarrassed.

"Really," he said, looking to Ice and Elec, "I need you out of the room. And, please, _please_, take the Peng with you. They don't need to hear this either."

Ice and Elec shared another bemused glance, but the two Peng units made their way over to Ice, obediently following their Master in formation as he and Elec left the room, glancing dubiously back to Zero and Rocinolle once more. Nothing that they'd want to know? And Zero was hitting his head against the wall again.

Another look was shared between the two 'brother' units as they moved a ways down the hall, out of sight and, more importantly, out of earshot. The two Peng units were cheeping agitatedly, Sheridan answering with an occasional beep of his own, and Ice distractedly pet him, still going over what Zero just said along with recent events, trying to figure out what had the Wilybot behaving so oddly.

He was coming up empty. "We're missing a variable," Ice murmured, half to Elec and half to the robots in his care.

Elec leaned casually against the wall, still frowning. "If it's honestly that bad, I really don't think I want to know."

X moved behind his siblings, dropping into a low hover and resting his head in his hands.

He really hoped that there was something akin to tact in Zero's programming. If his behavior from the century prior was any indication, he was going to leave Rocinolle crying trying to explain why and how it couldn't—_wouldn't_—work.


	32. The Ties That Bind

_Well, Zero's certainly found himself in a bit of a spot, hasn't he? With what little he knows from his 20XX memory files about the Robot Masters, he's got to be the one to let Rocinolle down gently. Goodness knows how Blues would respond to this kind of situation. _

_Once Zero finishes his talk with the young tech, he's got to turn right back around and figure out how to explain things to the Robot Masters. And here we all thought **X** was the diplomatic one._

_Zero's got a bit to say this time around to quite a few individuals, Protocol files are brought to light, and Rock's modus operandi gets spelled out for the baby Wilybot. Oh, and let's not overlook the plans for a very unique celebration in Neo Arcadia once things are set to right._

_And I would like to apologize for the late update: there was a portion in this chapter that I realized was poorly communicated. That combined with some real-life issues slowed this update, but here it is._

* * *

><p>"Master Zero?" Rocinolle asked, setting her tools on the table as she turned to the unit, the blond still hitting his head, albeit more softly than before, against the wall. "Is there—"<p>

"You can sit down," Zero said, though his tone wasn't harsh or reproachful. "I don't know how you're going to respond to this, but it would be in both our interests for you to sit down."

Rocinolle flushed a whole new shade of red as she dropped into a nearby chair. "Did I do something wrong?"

"Not…not wrong, per se," Zero said, grabbing a second chair and dropping into it once he'd moved to Rocinolle. Leaning forward, he took both her hands in his own. "I need you to be honest with me right now. How advanced is the attachment, if at all?"

The mechanic looked down for a moment, chewing on her lip, before she shrugged. "Nothing too serious," she finally answered, her voice barely audible. "I am concerned for his mental health, but I wanted to do something nice for him. After all he's given me, it's the least I could offer."

"But being a friend, being supportive, is one thing. When did the line of distinction get blurred?"

"I'm not really sure," Rocinolle said. "I'm…I feel terribly awkward about this because I spent so long repressing my emotional matrices that now…"

Zero leaned forward, brushing the back of one hand against the Reploid's cheek. "First off, stop looking at the floor. I'm not talking to your hair or your hairpiece, I'm talking to you. Secondly, it's nothing to feel awkward over. Every newbuilt ends up growing up and hitting this phase at some point. You're just adjusting differently because your operational time probably doesn't match with your emotional profile."

Rocinolle nodded. "What phase, though?"

"Our emotional matrices are just as complex as a human's emotions," Zero said. "It's part and parcel with growing up as a pseudo-human race that we hit the same emotional roller coasters they go on, even if our programming doesn't mimic their psychological and biochemical setup the same way. But…" and here Zero paused. Part of him was screaming to ask why it had to be Blues, why she couldn't have had this happen with someone else. For all the units listed as still active in his databank, why the eldest? What was so special that she couldn't have had this happen with someone else? Of the five Robot Masters, he would have had an easier time had it been Elec. Even _Shadow_ being the unit involved would have made this easier to approach her about.

But _Break's_ databank profile? Zero had been hesitant to look through that with a metaphorical ten-foot pole.

"Rocinolle, you are aware that those units, that Break…that Blues and the other Robot Masters," and he brought her eyes level to his. "You know they're the design progenitors, right? Especially so with Blues because he's Rock's, just like Rock's is X's?"

"Is this an age thing?" she asked suddenly.

Zero actually gaped at her for a moment, then facepalmed, pressing a hand against her mouth when she tried to continue speaking. "No, Rocinolle, it has nothing to do with age, even if those units are older than me and X. What…what I'm trying to say is they don't think the same way we do. They don't think like androids, like Reploids. They aren't…despite Blues and Rock being human interface units, most of them weren't, and overall, that meant that they're more machine than we are. They're more…well," and Zero grasped for words for a moment. "They operate as machines, they think as machines, and while they have emotional programming and capabilities, they don't feel attachment in the same sense as you and I."

"What…I don't…I don't get what you mean," Rocinolle said. "How…?"

"Blues is technically two generations behind X in terms of programming and design. And he's got…there's a lot in his past that I know fragments of, and there's a lot more I'm sure I have _no clue_ about, but this? You? He's not going to respond well. He doesn't make attachments the way we do. For us to consider that is second nature; we don't overanalyze it, even if we do end up wondering why."

"Because of the lack of biochemical signals?" She at least knew a bit about human laws of attraction. "But why would he respond negatively to me…well…"

"Blues has a very involved, very touchy past, and I'm not going to assume I even have the right to make educated _guesses_ about it. I can say this, though. For him to trust you enough to teach you, for him to take you under his wing? It's impressive, to say the least. For you to tell him something of that magnitude, even if it's just a fledgling attraction right now, more of an interest in him because of what you see in him and your emotional programming finally being allowed to run proper? Rocinolle…you'd destroy all your work, all you've learned, all his faith in you, because he wouldn't…he wouldn't…" His hands gripped hers again, supporting her. "He wouldn't return them. He wouldn't reciprocate. It's not so much that they can't, it's more—"

"You're saying that none of them are capable of bonding with another unit?" Rocinolle was shocked.

"They do bond. Don't question their ability to form links and connections to one another because it's there and _it puts our level of connection to shame_. The difference, though? Everything they do, every interaction, every link, every connection forged between them, it's all part of their social hierarchy. If Blues were to ever express his version of this attraction you're dealing with, he'd be asserting his authority over you as the Master unit, with you as his subordinate, just as he does with Rock. And with us being as we are, with our programming sets so different from theirs? He _can't_ assert Mastery over Reploids. The closest he'd be able to get is 'adopting' you into the network, into their social structure, but even then…" Zero looked at Rocinolle, reaching up to wipe the tears from her eyes. "Don't cry. This isn't anything to cry over. It's still new to you, to feel like you are, but don't let this hurt so much. It's…the first time it happens can be hard, especially if it doesn't turn out the way you'd like, but that's no reason to let this wound you. It's a little odd for me to address this because it's a Robot Master and not a Reploid or a human that you're attracted to."

Rocinolle nodded a bit, though she didn't fight the few tears that fell. "I'm guessing they're pretty much all…all this way?" she asked.

Zero actually had to hold back a snort at that. "Why, did…?" and he looked to the doorway the others had walked through a few moments before.

The Reploid's eyes went wide. "Oh! No, nothing like that!" and her hands had snapped up, pulled from Zero, to rise into a defensive position. "I was simply asking in the event that someone else made the mistake—"

"It's not a mistake. Never think of this as a mistake. Like I said, the first time may not always end well," and Zero suppressed the memory restore that was trying to start up, setting the file to restore during hibernation, "but you don't kick yourself for it and you don't let yourself lock up because of it. You learn from it, as we learn from every experience. Give yourself time to understand and give yourself time to heal," and she was going to need it, being shot down by a unit that had _nothing_ to do with the one she'd been developing an emotional attachment toward, "and things will work out in the end. And if anyone else at this base ends up with this, I'll handle it as best I can."

And, here, Zero couldn't fight the smirk. "Besides, I'm fairly certain you could find a decent programmer or tech-head that would love you to show him the ropes of _proper_ program coding or a few tricks of the trade about systems maintenance for the mechaniloids."

"You say that like I'd have a better chance with Cerveau," Rocinolle shot back.

Zero shrugged. "Wouldn't be a bad choice," he said. "You both have that 'I spend my days elbow-deep in machine parts and smell of coolant and lubricant by the end of the day' thing going on."

Rocinolle simply stared at Zero. Had he taken her comment _seriously_?

The blonde couldn't suppress his laughter any more at her expression. "Rocinolle, I was _joking_!" Even if the two did have a few things in common, he'd only meant the comment to try and lift her out of the slump she was slowly falling into. "I was just…"

The laughter, it turned out, was contagious, especially once Rocinolle let the idea roll around in her processor for a moment.

A short while later, their laughter starting to peter out, Zero rested a hand against Rocinolle's shoulder. "Are you okay now?"

The mechanic nodded a bit. "It'll probably be a little awkward once Blues-sensei does start coming back to the lab, but," and she nodded here, a bit more firmly than she had been. "I'll be fine."

"If you ever need to talk, though," Zero offered. He wanted to make sure she'd be okay before leaving the room.

"I know, Master Zero," she affirmed. "I'll give it time, and I'll be better for it." And she smiled. "Thank you."

Ice and Elec were glancing toward the lab again, confusion written all over their features—Zero and Rocinolle had been speaking for several minutes, though the Robot Masters were too far away to hear what was being said, but now? Now they were definitely _laughing_.

Elec looked to X again, but the Cyber Elf wasn't answering any of their queries, only floating there with his face in his hands.

It was almost irritating that it was being kept from them, but, at the same time, Elec figured that if it was a touchy or embarrassing subject for Rocinolle (and by Zero's reaction, it _was_), then she deserved her privacy.

"Do you want me to poke my head in, see if it's okay to even _walk_ that way?" X said, though he didn't dare look at either of his brothers. Internally, he was still in a heated debate with himself as to whether or not they needed to know _at all_, disregarding that it was Zero who had a real say in the matter.

Elec noted how X was studiously avoiding their gazes, as though whatever was being spoken about was embarrassing X, too. He looked to Ice again, but the little Lightbot was just as bemused as Elec. "If you think that would be a good idea," Elec finally answered, though by his tone, he honestly had no idea.

X had just gotten to his feet when Zero stepped out of Rocinolle's lab, smile on his face and his helmet tucked under his arm. "Hey," he called out, "mind heading down to my room? I want to try and discuss this with everyone, but it's better if I don't go about embarrassing Rocinolle right after I helped her with this. And can someone please message Shadow?" And he headed for the lift without even waiting for an answer.

X did send a message out to Shadow, but he remained where he was, looking to his brothers, his link humming with confusion.

Well, that made three of them, Elec's confused expression clearly communicated to X. He and Ice glanced to each other once more, but Elec straightened from the wall and the two Robot Masters began to head for the lift, pausing only to make sure X was following.

Shadow responded to X immediately, assuring the Lightbot that he'd be down in Zero's room in short order.

Zero was resting in his chair (which he'd found out from Cerveau was a replacement) when the three units entered his room, and he let his eyes flit across a few of the visible shadows, waiting for his brother to show up.

"She seems to have…taken things well," X said, dropping once more into a hover.

"She…" and Zero shrugged. "She has time and she understands now. It'll be okay."

Shadow slipped from the shadows once the others entered the room, emerging on the side of the room nearer Zero and leaning against the wall as Ice and Elec both sat on the bed. Really, it was impressive how much they were able to clean up and restore in such a relatively short span of time. The room looked almost as it had before Zero's tantrum.

"Okay, so what's going on?" Elec repeated once Shadow appeared and everyone settled. It wasn't a very large leap of logic to assume that whatever was going on with Rocinolle had something to do with himself and Ice, even indirectly, and the fact that they'd reconvened elsewhere after the two androids were so tight-lipped about it made Elec almost uneasy: no one was hurt, so what could be that bad?

"You're both First Numbers," Zero said, looking to Elec and Ice, "and you're one of the Third Numbers," he said to Shadow, "which still means you were all around before the start of either the Zero or X Projects. My question right now, just to level the field and make sure we're not staring at each other like we've all loosened something in our processors, is how much do any of you know about android emotional programming, the capabilities and limitations, stuff like that?"

"It's built to closely match human emotional and mental tendencies," Ice answered, blinking as he looked between Zero and X. "We—Elec and I—weren't really at the lab often at all; when we weren't there for maintenance or repairs, we were generally working. Rock has the most comprehensive idea, and all of that data was transferred to Blues," for better or worse, "But as I understood it, there are growth periods from the time as a newbuilt into adulthood, and phases not unlike what humans experience as they transition from childhood to adolescence, and then into adulthood."

"Now, nothing in either of the profiles I have for you two," and he pointed at the Lightbots again, "indicates that you had any sort of long-term contact with younger humans. Mostly the techs and managers for the facilities you worked at, right?" And that said nothing of the sad little flicker of a file that was Wily's data on Shadow.

That stopped Elec and Ice. "Profile data?" And this time, Ice's voice was a bit sharper, a bit akin to the tone he'd been using when dragging Zero from his room.

"Father…Doctor Wily would have called them comprehensive profile data files, but how comprehensive is really up for debate, seeing what his role in your wars was," Zero admitted. "I've got profile data for well over a hundred units, though it really depends on what 'family' we're referencing when it comes to how detailed the notes are."

Elec nodded slowly, although it was a bit unnerving (though unsurprising) to know that Zero has such a comprehensive data set for all of them. "As for your question about how frequently we saw younger humans, it wasn't exactly the kind of situation where they'd bring their kids to work," he said dryly, not that he was complaining; the little ones would have been bored to tears and thus gotten underfoot. And that said nothing of human teenagers. His very brief encounters with Kalinka Cossack left Elec secretly glad that Rock and Roll would never hit that phase.

Forte had been _stuck_ in that phase, now that Elec thought about it, hadn't he?

X remained knowingly silent.

"Reploids, unlike human children, are almost always built to look like humans in the late years of adolescence or early to middle adulthood. Their minds, however, do have to grow. Part of this means that we have to deal with our emotional matrices adjusting to the world around us, and while we tend to mature faster than humans, we still have certain stages that we hit. With the repression going on in Neo Arcadia, and I at least know this for sure with Rocinolle, is that their operational age and their AI's maturity are completely out of balance. That being said, Rocinolle…" Zero stopped after a moment. "I'm not going to dance around the subject, but this does _not_ get relayed to Rock _or_ Break. _Ever_."

Okay, _that_ got the Robot Masters' attention. Ice looked more deeply confused, Elec raised an eyebrow under his mask, and Shadow closed his eyes.

"Rocinolle was very deeply concerned for Break's mental health. She looked at the situation from a very human perspective, the way _we _would understand it, which meant providing something to help him deal with the stress would be good for his overall condition. Pets were always seen as a good option, so she made him a unit from scratch, coded it, and waiting for the unit's owner to activate it. That's all well and good, _and that's all we're ever letting Break know about it_. Because if he finds out that she had a second reason, he's going to take it very poorly, probably leave the base, and just _possibly_ abandon Minuet." Zero let that fact hang in the air for a minute, the thought rolling around in his head that it wouldn't be the first time Break had refused a possible-subordinate unit for his (nigh impossible to figure out) personal reasons.

"What are you talking about?" Elec could not fathom what could be so bad that it'd cause Blues to abandon this base.

"Rocinolle basically pulled a very base level, _very_ low-key Kalinka," Zero said flatly.

Ice's eyes became very round, but Elec shot straight up, "She _what?_" That was…_what the hell?_ With _Blues_? How was she even expecting that to _work_? If Elec didn't already know that the Reploid had absolutely no idea of how their social structure worked, he'd think she was incredibly presumptuous and _absolutely delusional_.

Ice remained staring at the floor, trying to work out how that could even _happen_. "That's…" Completely impossible.

"You're far too self-confident to be so vocal about your surprise," Zero said, looking to Elec, "so sit back down and lower your voice before Rock or Break _hear you_."

"Wait a second," X cut in. "Who or what is a Kalinka?"

Zero made a sweeping motion with his right hand, as if opening the floor to another speaker. "Either of you care to enlighten your brother about Doctor Cossack's daughter?"

Ice buried his face in his gloved hands, shaking his head. He still couldn't figure out how that girl came to the conclusions she did.

Elec did sit back down, turning to answer X in favor of frowning at Zero. "Did Blues at least tell you that there were three main family lines among us?" When X nodded, Elec continued, "For the Fourth War, Doctor Wily blackmailed a Russian roboticist by the name of Doctor Cossack into converting his Robot Master units into combat robots, then building a few more as combat-only robots. Those eight were front and center for the Fourth War. Normally, Doctor Cossack would have refused Wily, but Wily kidnapped his daughter, Kalinka, and was holding her hostage. So long as Doctor Cossack listened, Kalinka remained safe." And the girl had been in very real danger.

"Rock had no idea that that was what was going on: all that he saw, all that the world saw, was that a new man was attacking the world using Robot Masters. Rock treated it just like the first three wars and Doctor Cossack never said a thing about the kidnapping or the blackmail, and neither did his units. They_ couldn't_. Doctor Cossack would have died at the end. The deal was that, if he lost, he self-destructed and Kalinka would live."

Elec took a breath, clearly sickened by this scheme, "Blues completely ruined Wily's plan. He found out about the doctor's daughter and rescued her, then brought her to where Rock and Cossack were fighting. From there, the Cossacks became close allies to us, the Light family. And from that day, Kalinka…" The Robot Master trailed off, looking confused, still unable to fully understand what he was telling X, "I'm not certain how deeply it ran, but Kalinka did, at least, have some sort of affinity toward Blues. He was treated differently from the Cossackbots when he was over there." Rare as that was. Elec wasn't certain if the humans would count whatever Kalinka was going through as a 'crush' or categorize it as something else, but, he figured, it couldn't have been that overbearing since Blues kept going back there.

"Doctor Cossack was the _only _human that Blues would permit to touch him." Do maintenance or repairs on him. And that alone should tell X what the Cossacks meant to Blues.

"So it's not the first time Blues had to deal with…" X stopped, looking down. "How did Blues react to Kalinka?"

"Kalinka had the advantage in that she understood Robot Masters, understood how we think, and although she didn't fully understand why Blues was the way he was, she was able to contain herself to a respectable degree. He had both her and Doctor Cossack somewhat 'adopted' into his networks since it worked well as protection for them," from the Wilybots, "and I did not see her much, but from what Rock said in passing, and from what her brothers said when they popped into our Harmony to say hello, Blues at least turned on a larger portion of his interface programming to be able to deal with her and her father." Which was a tremendous gesture coming from him. "It was rare for them to see him more than once a year or so, but he wasn't unfriendly toward either of them."

"But that's not something we need to bring up with Break, and I'm fairly certain that letting him know Rocinolle did so indirectly and unintentionally is a bad idea. Emphasis on bad." Zero turned to Ice. "You've been awful quiet. What's bothering you?"

"Kalinka isn't a good sample to use. She was an exception to Blue's behaviors, not the rule. It'd be like using Rock to determine the norm for how Blues treats other units. But letting him know any of this at all is a very bad idea. He'd be gone from the base for at least a month, Rock along with him." Ice was frowning still, thinking back. "If he found out, best case scenario is that he disappears, but eventually does come back, but doesn't interact with Rocinolle any longer." At the minimum.

Elec nodded: that sounded about right.

"I was more referencing a few of Father's more…_eloquent_ rants about how he couldn't understand a human empathizing with a Robot Master like Break, how she could stand to be around him. Like I said, my files are by no means the be-all, end-all when it comes to any of you, so I apologize if the comparison was faulty."

Ice smiled, a bit sadly, "Well, given your source…" Of course they were horribly stilted.

"I'm suddenly left with the realization that I'm on the outside looking in," X said, drawing the attention of the others. "Three of you were alive when Rock was and Zero has the files, so…" he paused, looking to Elec when he finally figured out which of the units would be best to ask. "Rock isn't acting all that different even with his memories intact. Ten wars, who knows how many years, and he's still acting like he's twelve years old despite it all."

Zero could only stare blankly at the Cyber Elf.

Elec looked confused, too, but only for an instant as he finally realized _why_ X was even asking this. The Robot Master had an unreadable expression on his face, but his voice was quiet and a bit grim when he finally spoke, "X, Rock wouldn't be acting older than that. _Won't_ be acting older than that. He has a pre-programmed upper age limit." A limit to how old he could be, to how old he ever _would_ be.

Zero sighed heavily as he leaned back in his chair, rubbing the fingers of one hand against his temples.

"Wait…an…a…he's _aged-capped_?" X was flabbergasted. Of all the things to do, the impositions to set on a unit? "So Light not only installed the Three Laws on a unit that had a developed personality, he locked the AI age setting for…" X looked to his brothers. "What else do I not know about my creator?" What else had he and Rock hidden behind those happy smiles, those comforting reassurances, in his early stages?

"Doctor Light wasn't a wholly bad person. He wasn't malicious the way Wily was," Elec began, "and do _not_ speak poorly of him in front of Rock. He does not like that, and before you ask, his feelings toward Light aren't a preprogrammed impulse. They're genuine." And really, no, Elec did not want to drag out an old laundry list of past transgressions, but he knew he'd have to say something either way. "Blues did not do well, and Doctor Light first thought it was because he was isolated in the lab—which was partially true—so he built us, 003 through 008, as a set, and then built the twins as a matched set. The idea was that they'd have each other and would be happier for it. That's why none of the Robot Masters were built alone from then on." Even Forte had a support unit. "But a lot of what he was doing was uncharted waters, I suppose, and after Blues…" After having such an independent, dominant unit? Children weren't frightening, and those were the units Doctor Light would be living with on a day-to-day basis. "Rock wasn't supposed to be a combat unit. That wasn't something Doctor Light ever intended or wanted." And it killed him to have to send Rock out, war after war, to watch it slowly break the child down.

X's brow furrowed heavily. Elec and Ice had arrived within a few short days of each other, Shadow seemed more networked to Blues than anyone else, but Rock? Even with his memories as they'd been, even as a newbuilt, had been an emotional yo-yo until Ice had restored his memories. "The way Rock has been the past few weeks, newbuilt status and his Master unit's condition taken into consideration would it have been as hard had Roll been here?" Since they were a 'matched set', as Elec had called them?

Were it not for the fact that his hand was currently shielding his eyes, X would have seen the panic fire through Zero's eyes. Rock's twin sister, the 002 unit, had been, as far as Zero knew, unmentioned around X.

She was also one of about fifty units catalogued in Zero's database with an addendum note that listed her as destroyed.

Both Elec and Ice became very still, both sensing the slip. They'd not realized that X knew so little, but given that Blues was the one doing the most of the talking until now, it shouldn't be surprising them. The link between Ice and Elec was going rapid-fire now, taking only seconds, no longer than a human would pause to gather themself, but a full-blown debate took place in that rapidly-closing window in time. Elec was the one to speak again. "The Harmony isn't just a communications network. It's not…it never was me in my plant, and Fire in his, us ignoring each other, or only talking to shoot the breeze. The families were supportive of one another. When there's an upset, the _entire Harmony_ feels it. Honestly, part of why Rock is still being a bit emotional about Blues now is the shock of adjustment to this century alongside everything that's happened to them." The cannibalism, the attempt to kill Rock, the upsets here, the attack: it was amazing that Blues actually stayed and didn't change nests, if only to calm Rock.

"Rock's more stable now, though, and that's for several reasons: his memories for one, and things have settled down at the base. Blues' condition is stabilized and Ice and I are here now." So even while Blues was offline, Rock could reach into Elec's systems for answers and reassurances, and once Ice came and Blues woke up? "The supportive base is in place, and with the addition of you and the ones he's met here, it'll only continue to fortify and grow." The addition of Phantom and Harpuia, even if the Reploids couldn't do it as well as other Robot Masters.

"I don't…I don't remember Fire," X said, latching onto the name. "Don't think I met him."

"DLN-007," Zero rattled off, the file having been popped open the minute Elec mentioned the unit, though he bit back the comment that X would probably get to meet him, given time.

"So Rock's okay now that the network's more…more established?" X asked. "I can hear the Harmony when I'm accessing the net, when I'm logged on, but I…it's just…it's music to me. There's something more there for you, though?"

"Oh, is that how Blues set it to translate? I was wondering," Ice mused, "There is. What you're hearing is only the surface level of data. We, the Robot Masters, communicate empathetically. When Elec and I have our link fully open, it's not just status updates or messages. We can access one another's thought processes at the moment—especially if we're working on solving a problem—and we can feel what the other is feeling at the moment. Not just understand that the other is content, or angry, or irritated, but _experience it_." And the two of them weren't even in a Master/Subordinate type relationship. The link between Rock and Blues ran far deeper.

"Oh," X said. "Wow. I wasn't aware that it worked quite like that. So, you're able to link together like that, truly meet minds towards an effort?" That kind of networking for Reploids? Non-existent and impossible to boot. "How many units can fully link like that at once, or is it just…the concert being made up of whoever shows to play?" since he understood their link as a musical sound, as a symphony despite the occasional discordance.

Ice smiled. "There are varying levels, depending on what we're doing and what we need at any given moment, but if need be? Everyone in the Harmony can meet minds to work to one goal. There's no limit on how many of us can cluster together. Rock and Blues are always fully linked into one another, that's the relationship type, but Blues can read more of Rock than Rock can of Blues." That was the Master's right. "But if you just mean…parallel units, like myself and Elec? We do not fully sever our links, not unless we're going offline for maintenance. So they're always there, we're all always there, even right now. It's a red flag if a unit shuts everything out and assumes a presence that's more like what a Reploid or human could do." A sign that something was _wrong_.

"So for me to shut down my link, or at least the emotional aspect of it?" X asked worriedly, looking to Elec.

"Hmm," Ice tilted his head, considering, querying Elec about what X was worried about. Oh, wow. Ice hadn't really registered that, but Ice was also not fully linked in at that point. "We don't…since we're able to be empathetic, it's a bit of a moot point to keep most secrets—though this issue with Rocinolle is a special case—but you're also not a Robot Master, and humans are so _private_." Ice supposed that they seemed blunt compared to humans, but really, when the feeling was there in the link, why try to hide it? "I'd be concerned if you did that, but I wouldn't be as likely to think you were being threatened, but it'd feel," and he trailed off for a moment, then continued, "doing that is a bit of a faux pas to us." A little bit rude, even if Blues did it all the time.

Well, Blues wasn't known for being polite.

"Oh. Sorry," and X fidgeted a bit, toying with the hem of one of his sleeves.

"Don't be," Elec waved it off, "it's not a huge infraction, and you're not a Robot Master, so it's expected that you'll have different views of what you do and don't want leaking onto the network."

"Speaking of the network and the Harmony," Zero said, looking to Elec, "what are the chances of me being able to get that peripheral after what happened with Break last week? I know he deciphered my coding, but I know it's not in my best interests right now to be asking anything of him except his forgiveness." And even that was questionable, knowing that it was wiser—for the time being, anyway—to keep a healthy distance away from the elder Robot Master.

Elec hesitated for a moment, his expression hovering between surprise and apprehension. "If you want him to do _anything_ for your benefit, well…" The Robot Master frowned, Ice glancing sidelong at him. "Right now, he'll probably shoot you if you asked him outright." Hell, he'd probably shoot Zero for being in the same _room_ as him. What Zero needed was to give Blues a reason to tolerate him again. "I'd say that instead of focusing on Blues, work on Rock. A lot of what he does is for Rock's sake, not his own." So if Rock liked Zero enough and if Zero proved himself to not be a threat whatsoever, then he may be able to get Blues to code the peripheral for him as well.

Zero nodded. "I figured as much. About Break, at any rate. I asked more because of the Harmony, because I know of it, but I don't…I wasn't part of the network back then; even if Father did have me at least mentally online during my construction phase, I wasn't allowed wireless access. I'm thankful now, all things considered, but…" The blonde looked to his brother for a moment, then shook his head. "I'm a little tired of feeling separated from everyone else. The Resistance sees me almost the same as they do X and tends to treat differently, and without my memories from my main active time, all I've got to go on is flashes of my past to know that I am who they think I am."

X sighed. "You are Zero, memories or no, second body or otherwise," he insisted. "I wouldn't lie to you about something like that, let the Resistance—"

"I didn't say you would," Zero countered. "I'm just saying that until more restore, until I have more than just 20XX and now, I'm a bit adrift at sea. I have you, yes, but one unit that treats me as an equal, perhaps more if any of the Robot Masters upgraded me from Forte's level," and he glanced questioningly at Ice, "doesn't make the isolation any easier to take."

"This from the android that locked himself in a room and disconnected from the communications network for over a week," X shot back with a teasing smile.

"Touché," Zero said. "Although, I have no idea what I could do to have Rock see me any differently."

"You can start by minding what you're saying around him," Elec said as he leaned back on the bed, against the wall, and crossed his arms. He locked his gaze on Zero. "Your background data on Blues seems to be comprehensive on some aspects, so you should realize how much _Rock_ likes a person has a direct impact on whether Blues will even tolerate them. In the lab earlier, when he was repairing us, you ducked and ran once you registered that he was there. He didn't say anything, but it did hurt his feelings," Elec picked that up from the Harmony, "and I'm certain Wily left data on how closely interconnected a Robot Master is to his subordinate unit." So Blues knew Rock was sad the moment Rock himself knew he was sad.

And if there was one things Blues did _not_ like, it was a sad Rock.

Zero blinked for a moment, then ducked his head a bit, "Talk about a misunderstanding. I didn't mean that in the sense that I minded Rock being there inasmuch as it was I didn't want to discuss the memory files around him. There is a _lot_ of data in those files and I have to be careful how I word it to _Cerveau_. His work with my files necessitates at least an idea of what the files contain to see if there's a relation between them and the trigger, even if the Protocol activating _was_ the trigger. It's…I didn't want to say anything with him there, and by extension, any of you, because it'd be just as bad as bringing up the past to your faces."

"I understand that," and it made Elec wonder what, exactly, Zero had rolling around in his processor in terms of dirty laundry, "And that's why I said you should mind it. Rock's in the business of making friends. He gives _everyone_ a chance, regardless of whether Blues feels they deserve one." And honestly, Blues wasn't interested in making friends. His experiential sets were…disturbing didn't even begin to cover what life taught Blues. "And X clearly likes you, which will make Rock curious, will make him _want_ to get to know you. And now that he's not a newbuilt, he can move around more independently. He may not actively seek you out at first, but he is curious."

"Curious about what, exactly?" Zero asked. "I mean, aside from the stories, there's not much I know about myself."

"About _you_," Ice said, frowning. "He's not looking for bedtime stories. He considers you to be a part of his social circle, albeit a satellite entity at the moment," a part of the circle because Zero was an integral part of X's circle. "So he'll want to get to know you one way or another." Rock was _friendly_.

"And therein lies the problem," Zero fired back. "_I_ _don't know myself_. Not the me that is part of those bedtime stories, not the me that X remembers. I remember me on Wily's lab table, the shattered little fragments of me I've restored from X's time, the me that I was during the last battle of the Elf Wars, and what I've known since I was reactivated just a few short weeks ago in Neo Arcadia. How, in all of that, do you not get that the person I am right now, the person my memories tell me I am, is _not_ someone Rock needs to associate with?"

Elec pinched the bridge of his nose with one hand, closing his eyes, while Ice frowned at Zero. The point.. He completely missed it. "You're talking like that matters one way or another. It may to you, but it does not to Rock. He doesn't give a damn about whom Wily _meant_ you to be, and regardless of what you remember, to Rock, you are still Zero, still the android he sees in these halls. You're still impacting the people around you, and he can't not responds to that."

"It's his strategy set," Ice said quietly, "His experiential data. You have to take that into consideration." For both Zero and for Rock.

"I know that, but it won't do him any good if he snaps at Rock for being Rock," Elec sighed.

"You're still…" Zero frowned, fighting back the urge to scream at _them_ for acting like they were. When he finally started talking again, his voice was low, even, and _highly_ agitated, made all the more evident by the fact he'd slipped into German again. "You're still not listening to me. Rock was never meant to be a combat unit. _I'm a fucking machine of war."_

Zero sucked in an uneven breath, trying to calm himself. "He doesn't need to know me, not as I am now, not as I know myself right now," he finally managed.

"So would you rather we ask Blues to order Rock to avoid you at all costs?" Ice asked, his voice a bit cold. "It could be done if that's what you prefer, though command lining Rock like that would be upsetting to both of them." And it would have to be a command; it rubbed too far against Rock's now well-developed personality otherwise.

"I…I…" Zero looked to X, as if for some sort of unseen third option, and sighed when X remained silent. "I don't know, okay? I don't. Rock doesn't like war, hates fighting. All I know, all I can remember, or at least an overwhelming majority of it, has to do with me either actually fighting or being told that my sole purpose in life was to fight. I can't let him know about my past, about the memories from your time, because it's something that needs to stay buried—_for all of you_—but to befriend him now, with what I have? It'd all be a lie, a friendship based on false pretenses and this vague notion that I'm some sort of hero when I _can't remember_."

"Then I don't know what you're asking us to do for you," Ice said, still frowning. It didn't make sense: asking for a solution set and rejecting the best one for all involved? "But regardless of what _we_ say in here, Rock is still going to be Rock."

"It sounds to me," Shadow finally spoke from where he'd been observing in the corner, "that you don't trust yourself because so much is missing but, at the same time, _when is the last time you did a serious recovery effort, Zero_?" The Wilybot's red gaze was riveted on the android. "You asked for a way to get Proto Man to tolerate you well enough to make that program and the most expedient method was supplied to you. Rock would not have a problem with it, but you clearly _do_. The clear solution, then, is to _work on what's bothering you_." Which was his missing memories. Really, was that so hard?

"And what between now and when enough of the non-combat memories come back? I can't push Rock away because that will upset him and, by extension, Break, but I can't let him use what X has told him as a basis for—"

"What I've told him?" X said suddenly, shock written all over his features. "I haven't talked to Rock about you, not with Blues as he's been."

"Then why does he even care about me? If he knows nothing of my past save that little snippet from the Elf Wars, why does he even see me as someone worth knowing?" Zero looked to the Robot Masters, confused.

And they stared back at him for several long moments. "I thought you said you had profile data on all the Robot Masters. You're telling me Wily didn't bother mentioning anything about Rock's personality?" Elec finally said, absolutely stunned.

Zero sighed heavily, opening Rock's profile and reading the text portions. "Unit DLN-001, alias Rock, alias Rockman. Support units: Rush, Lightbot canine support model; Tango, Lightbot feline support model; Eddie, Lightbot item transit and supply support model; Beat, Cossackbot avian support model. Threat/risk assessment: variable weapons system, buster can be augmented through close contact or weapons system chip upload from other Robot Master units. DLN-001 is a fully-sentient AI model, but age cap programming restricts AI maturity; actively seeking means of reprogramming or removing related coding. Annotation: Reprogramming attempt not advisable once Omega Protocol active, Priority One takes precedence. Activated with Three Laws as part of base programming. Annotation: Light is an idiot. Associated units: DLN-000, Proto Man, alias Break Man, alias Blues; DLN-002, Roll; all other active DLN models; all active DCN models. Possibility of Master/Subordinate relationship established between DLN-000 and DLN-001, destruction of DLN-000 established as Omega Protocol Priority One. Destruction of DLN-000 will cause severe mental destabilization of DLN-001, likely override pacifist tendencies." Zero stopped then. "I'm not reading any more. It just lists how I was supposed to dispose of Rock."

Elec was rubbing his left temple with one hand while Ice stared very hard at the floor, "Okay, so that's the kind of data he included. I'm a bit surprised he didn't include a personality profile." Although now that Elec was thinking about it…Zero had been lucky that Rock's memories were so fragmented when the attack happened. Rock would not have had the Three Laws restraining him, not when Zero wasn't a human. "Let me explain about Rock's strategy set. He modeled it after Blues' to some extent, though given their different experiences, his is applied differently." Really differently, "Every person you meet can either remain a stranger, become a friend, or become a foe. Rock thinks in terms of game theory, of how every social interaction is a transaction of sorts, and he has a savings account. He actively tries to make friends, he _does_ things for people who may not deserve it, because that's the most efficient way to exist. Most people aren't out to stab you in the back, despite what Blues says, and so, he began amassing friends and gives to them freely, expecting nothing in return. He does it to be nice; he does it because he likes making people happy. He does get a return, however, in that when he _is_ in trouble, just look at his social network. He has all these people who now want to help him not because they want something from him but because he was good for it when they needed help. So even though taking advantage of him seems like an obvious, fatal flaw, that's covered by the strategy. Because all those people he bonded with? Will unleash _hell_ on whoever hurts him.

"And you, Zero, are X's friend, whether you remember it or not. And X is Rock's brother and so is very deeply entrenched in Rock's social circle. You two are going to meet, so as far as Rock is concerned, you should be friends because it's beneficial to both sides. A stranger has no impact, a foe harms, so it's best to be friends. That's why he's curious."

Zero remained oddly silent for a long while, staring almost distantly at a spot on the floor the entire time.

"He's very much like a human child before they get to the age where experience makes them jaded," X noted. "And even with all that's happened, the game plan hasn't changed. With all he's known and seen, it's remained the same throughout." X knew that he'd never have been able to keep his original mindset and have survived as long as he had, physical body or not.

"I don't want him to feel responsible for me," Zero finally muttered.

"How does wanting to be your friend make him responsible?" X moved a little closer to Zero, reaching out and resting one hand near Zero's left arm.

"He's a Robot Master, and Blues' subordinate. They both code. They both tinker and fix things," Zero said, eyes finally focusing as he looked to X. "With my memories as they are and me likely categorized two steps and a sneeze past newbuilt, I don't want Rock to think of me as something he _has_ to fix." Zero looked to Elec. "Would he? I'm fairly certain he's aware of my memory issues, but would he try to find a fix, what with how he is?"

"Rock's primary responsibility in Doctor Light's labs wasn't related to programming, despite how skilled he is. It was an aspect of it, but Rock was built more for construction and maintenance work. But he would…encourage your healing, but he won't be compelled to 'repair' you like he would for a mechaniloid." Not to mention that recovering memories may not be the best thing to do in every case of amnesia. "Rock may have an AI maturity cap, but he understands a lot more than people give him credit for. He'd care, certainly, but he doesn't have you categorized as a unit beneath himself on our social hierarchy. A Robot Master with a Master like Rock has Blues generally won't be taking on anything other than animal-class units anyway." A child leading a child? Like the blind leading the blind.

X pressed a little closer to Zero's arm, and the blonde felt the light dance of X's energy against the suit, against his skin, and looked to the elf before resting his hand gently, carefully, over X's. "I just don't…I don't want to disappoint him. I don't want to disappoint any of you, especially now that I have so much to make up for." Zero drooped a little in his chair.

_This,_ Elec thought, _is why he's not categorized as an adult._ "You'll disappoint him—and hurt him—by pushing him away."

"I…the Protocol hurt his Master, hurt Break, in a way that is proving quite difficult to repair, in a way that dragged old memories out of their dark corners, that opened old wounds," Zero said. "You really think that Break's going to just let him idle into whatever room I happen to be in like I'm harmless, that I'm…?" Zero shook his head.

Ice opened his mouth to respond to Zero, but he froze and snapped his mouth shut, even as a smirk crawled across Elec's mouth.

Zero's door slid open and Rock stepped in, smiling, holding Minuet in his arms as though the cat had been for _him_ and not for Blues. Elec didn't think that Rock put the little mechaniloid down the entire time, but Blues had been pleased either way.

Rock saw the way they were sitting and how startled X and Zero looked and he hesitated, taking a step back, away from the threshold and into the hallway. "Um, is it okay if I come in?" He honestly hadn't even thought of knocking.

Elec's gaze shifted to Zero, his smirk speaking volumes. _Yes. Yes, he would_.

Zero could have sworn his vocal processor had shorted out from the shock, unable to speak despite needing to answer Rock, and he nodded after a moment.

X smiled at his brother. "Come on in," he said, waving Rock into the room.

Rock smiled, encouraged by X, and he moved to the bed, crawling up to sit next to Elec and cuddled into his side, even as he was still hugging the kitten close to his chest, "Blues said that it'd be better for me if I went out and was social," rather than sitting staring at a wall while Blues refortified his mind. Rock wanted to help and offered to link so Blues could at least borrow his processors, but the elder unit declined.

"Well, of course," X said, smirking at Zero, "Everyone needs to get out and meander around once in a while. It's far too boring to stay cooped up in your room." The elf looked at the cat in Rock's arms. "Minuet behaving herself? She's not clawing the furniture, is she?" even though he was sure Rocinolle hadn't programmed the mechaniloid to be _that_ similar to its biological counterpart.

"She's a good kitty," Rock smiled, stroking along the cat's back as she purred audibly, "She curled up on Blues after we got to the room, but he said I could take her with if I wanted," and Rock did. It made Rock happy and there was a continual feeling of approval from Blues in the link, wrapping over and around him, making Rock content.

"I'm glad Blues approves," X said. "Rocinolle seemed to do a good job with her," and X silenced himself before he let slip just_ how hard_ Rocinolle had worked. It wouldn't do to upset Rock by telling him Rocinolle had all but shut down on her lab table while working on the unit.

"He likes cats," Rock said, "Tango was his even though Doctor Light built him for me." Rock smiled at a far-off memory, his gaze becoming distant for several moments. "She did do a good job, though, especially with the coding. She improved a lot," though Rock didn't say that by now, both he and Blues had combed through the unit's coding, adjusting and organizing it according to Blues' system. It wasn't that Rocinolle did a bad job; it was more like organizing a new bookshelf, making it your own.

"I'll be honest," X admitted. "It may be partially because the files are moderately damaged, but I don't remember ever meeting any of your support units while I was being constructed."

Rock paused for a moment, looking down to Minute before looking up to X, a sort of confused expression dawning across his features, "Where did you hear about them? I don't remember ever telling you…" and if X had no memories about them…

Zero looked ready to fall out of his chair. _X, don't tell him, please don't tell him, don't bring it up, make something up, please for the sake of whatever friendship we had, __**don't tell him!**_

X shrugged. "Stuff that's come up while discussing memory files, but nothing major. I was just curious because I don't remember meeting them and I was wondering if maybe I had."

"I don't think you ever did. Rush and Tango didn't get along, but Tango was almost always with Blues, so they didn't usually get into it in the house anyway, but your lab was on a lower level from the main lab, and they didn't come down there unless they needed to," though Rock didn't add that Doctor Light tried to minimize the units that actually had data on X, in case they were ever confiscated or captured and had their memory banks picked through.

X nodded. "I guess that makes sense," and he didn't bother bringing up that Rock had only mentioned two of his units.

Rock's eyes dropped to his lap then, down to the little kitten in his arms as his presence in the Harmony trembled for a moment. He missed them all. Elec and Ice both reached to him over their links, comforting him even as Rock reached toward Blues, looking for affirmation and reassurance from the older unit. Rock knew that X wanted to know more, but…there was so much that X must want to ask…and Rock didn't want to think about it. Blues assured Rock that when it came to that, he'd take care of it; Rock wouldn't have to.

That Blues would be the one affected by that Q&A session didn't offer much comfort to the little Robot Master.

"So did you stop by and say hi to Phantom and Harpuia, or was here your first stop?" And, for that matter, was _Harpuia_ being in the same room as Rock going to set off any alarms for Blues?

Rock actually balked a bit at that, and he answered quickly, "No—no, this was my first stop." Blues hadn't met or evaluated Harpuia yet and, Rock realized, they should get on that, except no, Blues wouldn't want to be meeting any units he really disliked with his defenses as they were.

Rock realized that he might have to go back to the room.

X nodded. "Well, I'm sure they're keeping busy with…something in there," and X looked to the wall, the three feet of metal and wires and structural support separating him from his kids. "Though part of me *really wishes that they'd act more their age when they aren't on duty, if only because they haven't really shown it around base that they're almost..." And his eyes went wide

Ice blinked. "What's wrong?"

"Harpuia's birthday is next week and I nearly forgot," X admitted. "I was about to say that I was *a little frustrated by them acting the way they have been when they've been active for almost four decades* and it hit me that it _will_ be four decades for Harpuia in just a few days."

"We should do something for him," Rock smiled, kicking his legs slightly on the bed.

"Probably, but that…" and X frowned. "For what I'd normally do for them, it'd involve raiding the city, and, really, there's been enough going on." And he didn't want to trouble anyone for something like angel food cake.

"What about after we take the city back?" Rock blinked.

X smiled. "I'm sure Harpuia would be fine with that," and Rock's confidence that they'd take the city back? Were it not for Blues' current condition, he would have thought it almost possible with just the five Robot Masters there.

That, of course, relied more on the Robot Masters being able to sit down with X, Zero, and a few key members of the Resistance and going over things to make sure the coup would go off without a hitch.

And getting Leviathan and Fefnir before then would be a definite help.

"I'll take him sledding in the city," Ice smiled to Rock, both units giggling for a moment at a memory while Elec rolled his eyes. Yes, Ice _did_ enjoy sledding where he wasn't supposed to.

X laughed. "Knowing my kids, they'll want to go sledding year-round. Except Leviathan. She's got this odd little aversion to dry land." Which had been odd considering it wasn't something that had been programmed into her personality, even with her built as an aquatic model.

Zero _finally_ managed to find his voice, though what came out barely constituted a whisper. "I think snow makes the ground the exact opposite of dry."

"It does!" Ice nodded, as though this wasn't common knowledge. "I think that if we can get her to go once, she'll be hooked. The Peng make you go really fast."

"I saw as much in the memory file Rock restored when he and Blues were working on Sheridan," and X smiled softly at the thought. "The more I think about, the more I figure I'll be joining in on the sledding with everyone else."

The aforementioned Met cheeped and Ice bounced in his seat, shaking the bed slightly as he smiled widely at X, "You should!" Bringing more Peng along…well, he'd be doing that anyway, especially if they were taking over a city.

Neo Arcadia would have no idea what hit them.

"Climate control systems would help keep the air temperature right for snow, too," X said, "though Zero did mention before that sledding will probably devolve down into a snowball fight once the snow is right for it." And that brought a devious smirk to X's face. "Now there's a way to celebrate the reclamation of the city—a citywide snowball fight right at the beginning of the winter cycle."

Rock was in love. "We can make forts!"

"We'll have to divide into teams," Ice added thoughtfully, idly wondering just how big a sprawl he could get covered in snow.

"I call whatever team Ice is on," X said, still smiling. "What about you, Elec? Shadow?" Reaching over, he poked one finger through Zero's arm, setting off a small shock in the android's arm. "Come back to the world of the living, Z."

Zero snapped up, half-falling from the chair before he grabbed onto the seat and righted himself. "I…" and he clamped his mouth shut again when his voice still refused to register any higher than a whisper.

"You can be on my team, Zero," Rock grinned, "I'll show you the best way to play."

Elec smirked somewhat evilly, "I'll be on the team opposite Ice."

Ice blanched.

Zero smiled weakly, looking to Rock and nodded. "That sounds like a plan."

X reached out again, this time with his halo locked on red, touching a hand near Zero's throat. Had he damaged his vocal processor? The scans weren't showing anything out of the green, but X pulsed a bit of energy into the android regardless.

The blond's eyes expressed his thanks, even if his vocalized thank you was still as quiet.

Rock recognized what that soft, red light coming from X's halo meant—he'd used it in front of Rock before—and the child's eyes flickered with concern, "Are you hurt?" Was that why X was scanning him?

Zero turned back to Rock, thoughtfully quiet for a moment, then shook his head. "Not in the physical sense. I've…just got a lot on my mind right now," which wasn't really that far from the truth. Ever since Rock had shown up at his door, he'd been internally debating whether or not apologizing to Rock for what had been done to Blues was really a wise choice. On the one hand, not apologizing might eventually be seen as Zero not really caring about what had happened, but bringing it up to apologize for it would upset Rock and, by extension, Blues, and Zero had managed to lock himself in a mental stalemate, really wishing the third option of just being quiet would have been possible.

Rock nodded a bit thoughtfully, but didn't push Zero for more data. After everything that happened, Rock himself was a bit confused, and he wasn't even the one whose body and mind were taken over by someone else. Either way, Rock had some decisions to make, some distinctions to make, and the only way to determine what he needed to was by getting to know Zero a bit better. Because really, there had to be something good to come of this. There was too much pain to let it continue to wilt and wither.

"So, what—" X began.

"I'm sorry," Zero blurted suddenly, somewhat shocked that his voice hadn't been as quiet that time.

The room became very still, and so did Rock as much of the smile was wiped from his face. He wasn't displeased or upset by Zero's words, oh no, but…

Part of Rock wanted to tell Zero that no, an apology wasn't owed, even though it _was_. So, instead, he listened.

Zero ducked his head for a moment, the entire room's focus having turned to him, and stammered out a few nonsensical syllables before forcing his eyes up to meet Rock's. "I know what happened with Break wasn't…it wasn't me even if it was my body, but for whatever it's…" whatever little his word was worth now, "for what it's worth, I am sorry for what happened. I want…I want to remember who I was, who I am, and I know that's going to take time, but I don't want what happened to affect the way you see me, the way your family perceives me, and…I just…I want to…to be able to pick up from where things had been before the incident. I know that we can't act like it didn't happen, but…" and Zero's voice faltered then, his eyes shuddering a bit as he looked to Rock, waiting for a reaction and hoping said reaction wasn't going to come from Blues instead of Rock.

"We…we had to deal with people reprogramming us over and over," Rock began, his voice quiet as his gaze fell to his lap, his shoulders trembling slightly, "And I had to…I had to go out and get the units so they could be repaired," when it wasn't Wilybots that were fighting for Wily. "So I understand, I think, to some extent, what you must have gone through," though Rock himself was never reprogrammed. He only had to deal with the aftermath. Blues, though? "It…it _does_ hurt, and it _will_ hurt, but no one's blaming you, Zero, except maybe yourself. Your will was taken from you and yes…Blues was hurt, but _you_ were hurt, too. I think that if I learned anything during…during all of those wars, it's that hatred? Revenge? They achieve _nothing_. They create nothing, they build nothing. They only destroy, they eat away at people's hearts until there's nothing left but that hatred, and I…I don't want to see the world that way." Refuse to see the world that way. Because once you were hollowed out, what was left? _Nothing_. "I think that sitting and being angry at others, angry at the world, is the easy way. But getting up, standing, and moving forward? That takes strength, and maybe that's why there are people who are afraid of moving forward. But that's the only time things get better. So I'd rather move forward than look back.

Zero nodded, seeing a lot of sense in what the little Robot Master was saying, and realizing that, yes, to some degree, he was blaming himself for what happened, blaming himself for not being able to restrain the Protocol, keep it from activating, for not being able to warn Break. "I intend to move forward, even if it's a slow road for me. The wrong part of my past is rolling around in my head right now, making me question who I am and why I'm even here, but…" He smiled a bit, one corner of his mouth curling up as he looked to Rock. "I've got a batch of files set to restore when I set myself to hibernate tonight, and I'm going to do what I can to get the rest of it back, to reclaim myself, because even if the past isn't all that great…I'm only looking back in order to regain all I have of who I am. For myself, for X, for the Resistance, and everyone else in my life. I just…" He shook his head, pushing himself to his feet and slowly moving toward the bed, offering one hand to Rock.

Rock nodded, "Sometimes, you have to look back to tell which way to go to move forward, and there's nothing wrong with that," nothing wrong with Zero wanting to know who he is. Rock took Zero's hand, smiling a bit now as he reached up toward the android with his other arm.

Zero pulled Rock closer to him, slowly embracing the Robot Master in a hug. If a friend is what Rock wanted, if that's what he needed of the people in his circle, then Zero would be that friend. He would be one of many, but he would be _one of them_, regardless of his past and the things he had once been meant to do.

Rock smiled and snuggled into Zero's shoulder some, relaxed despite Zero's armor. It was bittersweet, really, Rock thought, but in a good way. Like they'd passed over a bridge that _really_ needed to be put behind them.

Zero sighed lightly as Rock nuzzled into him, smiling a bit wider as a new memory file booted into the queue and restored. He let the file play, watching it in his mind's eye even as he pulled from the hug. "Thank you," he said, the eyes he was looking into now glistening with hope while the ones in his memory had been flooded with tears. Moving back to his chair, Zero lowered himself onto the seat, his gaze distant as he let the file continue to play, and he reached out for X then, letting evanescent fingers twine with his own. "If you have time before you have to leave for Cyberspace, X, I'd like to talk to you tonight, see if we can't trigger a few more memories, load up the queue, before I plug up for the night."

X tilted his head, pondering the blonde for a moment before, "You triggered something just then, didn't you?"

Zero nodded, and he tried to keep his voice from breaking as he looked to the elf. "This isn't goodbye," he echoed, "not for good. They'll give me a clean bill of health and you'll be there when I wake up."

X _really _wanted to cry at that, responding nonetheless. "I'll be waiting for you, just like I was this time."

Zero was a little surprised to hear the same emotion in X's voice now that he'd heard a century ago, but he nodded regardless. "I'll see you again. I…" and Zero paused for a moment, scouring his memory files for what he was about to reference, but came up blank. "I made a promise I intend to keep."

For a moment, X really wished he could shut off his emotional protocols. He didn't want to break down, didn't want to start bawling again. "You did promise," he said, no longer speaking from the memory file, "and you've forgotten the promise." And there were those phantom tears again, threatening to spill despite the fact that they never would.

"Only temporarily," Zero said. "I'll look back to see where I have to go, but Rock's right. Things won't get better if I keep wallowing like this, keep second-guessing myself and whether or not I want to remember. I _have_ to remember." If he was going to live with the knowledge of what Wily had meant for him to be, he needed to know what he'd chosen to make of himself.

X shook his head, clearing it, and pulled his hand away from Zero's. "I really need to scour my own memory files, figure out what would be best for you to remember, what I could trigger that would give you more of an idea of who you were, and are. It's just..." The Cyber Elf fell silent for a moment. "There's decades of files to go through."

"We've got time," Zero assured. "And, really, I'm not looking to restore everything in one fell swoop, just get a few more files set to restore while I'm resting. I'm pushing the effort a bit, but maybe that's what I need to do. Waiting to accidentally trigger is all well and good, but I have to be more proactive."

"It's too bad you couldn't have a backup of your memory files," Rock frowned as he settled back on the bed beside Elec, his legs dangling over the edge. If Zero had backups, he'd have restored as easily as Rock did and there wouldn't be all of this fuss.

Rock wondered if he'd have been as upset about his missing memories as Zero was had Blues been anything other than completely unperturbed by it. He hadn't batted so much as an eye around Rock, merely adjusted his strategy sets accordingly and welcomed Rock back with open arms, both in person and through their link.

X remained steadfastly quiet about the fact that, at one point, there _had_ been backups.

"It is," Zero agreed, "but I'm not going to regret that there weren't. My time is better spent repairing the files anyway."


	33. Old Habits

_A nice bit of a turnaround here. Now that everyone is aware of the way Rock views the world, it's time to get a better grasp on how Blues works and thinks. Well...as good a grasp as can be provided with nothing more than words, anyway._

_Blues gets to frown at base security again, Rock finally gets to test his core in direct sunlight, X's saber specialists work out some excess energy, and Zero's mind is busy unlocking more of his unhappy past. Oh, and Harpuia and Phantom are tasked with re-teaching an old android a few tricks he forgot he knew. Congratulations, Zero, you've officially become the awesome (albeit slight amnesiac) favorite uncle._

* * *

><p>Blues spent the previous day and night rebuilding his firewalls and defensive systems from the ground up. A breach like that was not something you slapped a patch on and then forgot about. A breach like that meant that clearly, you'd been using the wrong software all along. That he'd come out of that altercation in one piece gave him direction, at least. Showed him where he'd been lacking. Now those vulnerabilities were taken into consideration, cruel a lesson though it was.<p>

He was still testing, still tinkering, still adjusting the minutia, but for the time being, he could walk around the base without feeling like there was a sniper's sights trained on his back.

And he and Rock still had some things to do for Rock's general upkeep, anyway. That was why they were taking the lift up to the first level. They hadn't had a chance to test Rock's solar core and, really, if it couldn't absorb energy properly, Blues needed to know _yesterday_.

Off the lift, up a ladder, and they were at what served as the 'front door' to the base.

And Blues had to stop and stare.

The door wasn't a door at all. Or rather, it would be had it been _shut_. The hidden base's doors were wide open and even from where they were standing, Rock and Blues could see sunlight filtering in.

"You two do realize you can't be out here too long, right?" X's voice filtered in from the open doorway.

"We won't be long, Father," Phantom replied. "Besides, there's nowhere else that's spacious enough."

"You're only saying that because you jump around like a crazed frog," Harpuia snapped.

"So you're saying that coming out here and giving _you_ the advantage because you have room to fly is better?"

Harpuia snorted. "I have the advantage regardless of where we are because I didn't train by sticking myself to ceilings and dropping onto people, I trained by actually sparring."

"I sparred," and Phantom sounded offended.

"By dropping on us from random hallway ceilings," Harpuia fired back.

"Both of you, stop arguing and get this training session done with or we can go back down now." X didn't sound happy to be topside, even if it was with two of his kids.

After a moment, both units responded, "Yes, Father," followed by the distinct sound of beam sabers activating.

If Blues was an optimistic person, he may just believe that the door was open because X was out here with Harpuia and Phantom, minding them while they sparred and burned their excess energy. From what he'd briefly seen of them in the hall when he went up to retrieve Rock (he was still irked that that hadn't gone as planned at all) and from what he heard here, well…they were bickering like younglings. Not quite newbuilts anymore, but not really adolescents either. And just how long had these two been activated? More years total than Rock, no doubt.

Either way, they had an itinerary to keep to and so, Blues caught Rock by the elbow and guided him forward, over the threshold and into the sun.

Into the desert.

There had not been a desert here in the twenty-first century. Not at all.

The sunlight was harsh and both Robot Masters had to take a moment to adjust their optics, their systems already tracking the combat (sparring) nearby, already monitoring it and assessing its threat level.

Harpuia ducked low, avoiding both the kunai that had been thrown and his brother's horizontal swing, smacking Phantom's katana aside with his main blade as his off-hand saber moved to pierce the younger Reploid's calf.

Phantom leapt back, refusing to allow Harpuia to cut into the same limb that Zero had pierced a few weeks prior, and tossed the Cross Star behind him, backflipping onto the emitter disc as the blades hummed to life, the weapon floating a few inches above the sand.

Harpuia watched his brother carefully, reversing the grip of his off-hand saber and batting aside another kunai. With the blades of Phantom's Cross Star active, it would be hard to get close enough for a direct hit where Harpuia wouldn't be putting his own limbs in danger. Taking a step back, the wing crests of his helmet pulling down a bit as his wings unfurled from his back, Harpuia engaged his thrusters and took to the air.

Phantom couldn't use the Cross Star as effectively against aerial units, after all.

Another set of kunai were flung at Harpuia as he flew higher up, all of them effortlessly batted aside, and the Rekku General dove for his brother…

Only to have Phantom disappear from view.

And reappear above him, Phantom's heel smacking right in between Harpuia's wings, sending the unit careening to the ground.

Harpuia recovered halfway through the hit, using what little speed he had to bank away from Phantom and climb back into the air.

"Come down here and fight!" Phantom called out.

"I'll stop flying when you disengage the Cross Star!" Harpuia shot back, switching the weapon settings for his sabers as he dove for the ground again. This time, he pulled up a few feet away from Phantom, sending twin waves of electricity out from his sabers.

Phantom jumped clear of the attack, landing effortlessly and darting in towards his brother, katana raised as a trio of kunai were thrown as a distraction.

Sabers danced through the air, humming as they moved, and Harpuia blocked Phantom's katana, smirking for only a second before feeling the sting of something piercing his thigh.

Phantom disappeared again, reappearing in a blur over the Cross Star and dropping back into standby position. "You okay?"

Harpuia pulled the kunai from his thigh, tossing the weapon to the ground as his auto-repairs fixed the damage. "Sneaky little toad," Harpuia called out.

Rock never liked training for battle. He hated fighting and he hated sparring. Which, he realized, was probably why Blues never gave him a choice in the matter. Of course, he and Blues never fought for fun, either. There was nothing fun about the wars, nothing fun about what Wily was doing. Blues made _certain_ to impress that thought on Rock early on. He and Blues kept moving, though, coming to a stop near X, watching the sparring. In that moment, Rock sorely wished he had his own sunglasses or visor. The sun was harsh and its light reflected up, off the sands and cracked dirt. The wind whipped around them occasionally, but overall, the air was fairly calm.

Harpuia took to the air again, but instead of angling upward, he moved forward, gunning for Phantom and swinging one saber out, a wave of crackling energy slicing through the air. Once more, Phantom jumped clear of the wave, but his eyes widened when he realized Harpuia's tactic.

As the elder's off-hand saber came bearing down on the center of the Cross Star, impaling itself into the power core, Harpuia darted towards his brother, his remaining saber raised as his thrusters cut out, coming down with an overhead swing.

The katana caught the saber fluidly, the two units locked for a moment before Phantom kicked his brother in the stomach, knocking Harpuia a few steps back.

Saber was brought to a side parry almost immediately, Harpuia batting the katana aside and swinging for Phantom's torso. Only the tip of his saber made contact, drawing a razor-thin line in Phantom's vest.

Phantom's eyes narrowed, the ninja suddenly on the offensive and pushing his brother back, the hum and hiss of their sabers winding through the air and meeting mid-swing continuing on for a long moment.

Harpuia watched his brother's motions carefully, noting that a few of his swings tended to go wide just before Phantom completed the attack, exposing a possible weakness. As Phantom drew back for an overhead swing, Harpuia switched his saber off, shoved the deactivated pommel against Phantom's throat, and grabbed the base of Phantom's katana's handle with his free hand, halting Phantom's attack. "Submit," Harpuia said with a smirk.

Were it not for the emitter cone pressed against the hollow of his throat, Phantom would have tried to come up with another option, another way to swing the fight, but he sighed, sagging a bit in place. "You win, Harpy," he admitted, "but _you're_ fixing my Cross Star."

Pulling away from the younger Guardian, Harpuia grabbed his other saber, deactivating it before dropping both weapons into their sheaths. Leaning down, he grabbed Phantom's weapon, looking it over quickly. "Nothing too major. I'll have to replace the power core and some of the wiring, but your emitters and rings survived."

"You're still fixing it," Phantom countered.

"I didn't say I wasn't going to." Harpuia handed the item back to Phantom. "Later, though." He turned then, facing X, Blues, and Rock, and bowed deeply. "Good morning, uncles," he greeted the Robot Masters, Phantom doing the same a moment later.

"Don't forget to pick up your kunai," X said. "This is just like Neo Arcadia's training deck; you make a mess, you clean it."

"We're not newbuilts, Father," Phantom said, trying very hard to keep the whine out of his voice.

"You're also my kids, and I'm very aware of what you used to _not_ do after training sessions back then."

Harpuia and Phantom both flushed at that.

"I'll…" Phantom said, pointing back behind him.

"I'll help," Harpuia offered.

Rock smiled to Phantom and Harpuia in greeting, but Blues didn't do more than incline his head to acknowledge them. Rock tilted his head and looked up to X, frowning, "They train this way a lot?" So they were expected to have to fight?

X nodded. "I did as well, sometimes with them, sometimes in simulations," and he knew better than to tell Rock that there was often more than a single stab wound inflicted during the course of a training session. "After the Maverick and Elf Wars, I wasn't about to sit idly by and let my children grow complacent. Well, _too_ complacent, anyway. We lost too many units in the Hunters because of it."

"It's to be expected, considering all of the warring," Blues said. It was better to be safe than sorry, even if Rock was sorry they all had to fight despite how hard Rock himself tried, how hard he fought to try and secure a future where no one would have to fight.

It was a foolish dream, but the child's optimism was…really, it was a breath of fresh air. Someone had to be optimistic, especially when he was too jaded to be that person.

Either way, Rock bit his lip, watching Harpuia and Phantom race one another in retrieving the blades from the battlefield.

Harpuia idly tossed one of the kunai towards Phantom, the motion meant in jest, but Phantom ducked to the side, dropping the five kunai he'd been holding in favor of holding onto only two, wielding them as short daggers. "Haven't you already won the fight?" he asked.

Harpuia was tempted to chide the younger Reploid for misunderstanding, but simply smirked, mimicking Phantom's actions. "Close quarters?" he asked.

"First to ten," Phantom returned, nodding.

"Both of you, stop it!" X ordered. "It's bad enough we're out here like it's a day at the beach, but now you two are starting up with this again?" Were it not for his inability to directly interact with the units, he would have knocked their helmeted heads together. Looking up to the sky, he idly hoped that Copy X and the Zan'ei units weren't busy doing satellite scans.

Then again, the security team would have let them know ahead of time if there was an active satellite overhead.

Still, it wasn't a bad idea to be careful.

Other Robot Masters may have wanted to join in on this fun that Harpuia and Phantom were having, but Rock liked other games better, even if Blues' systems were gently reminding him that they were out here for a reason and that reason wasn't watching the Guardians goof off. Interesting as it may be.

"I think we'll have to stay up here for a while," Rock said, turning to Blues, his tone almost apologetic. "It's not picking up as quickly as it used to."

Blues nodded. "I expected as much. We'll need to compile a complete data set, then I'll have to take a closer look at the components." Which meant opening Rock up. Not that that bothered Rock; he trusted Blues to his core.

"What are you…Oh," X said. "Your core?"

Rock nodded, "Yeah. It's not picking up a charge like it should, but when I pull energy from Blues', it holds the charge fine." So Rock was in trouble without being able to plug in, which completely defeated the purpose of a solar core. "We came out here to test it and see how well it's working."

"It's been a long time, the parts will have degraded," Blues told Rock, weaving reassurances into the link: it would be fixed. "I'll take a look and we'll know what needs to be repaired." And from there, he could order the parts sent along.

"What about the others? Ice, Elec, and Shadow? What are their cores?" X really should have asked this the moment the others arrived and mentally kicked himself for not having done so.

"Elec's is nuclear," Rock said, blinking up at the clear, cloudless sky, "and Ice's is solar, like mine. I don't know what Shadow's is," and Rock frowned, looking up to Blues.

"Shadow Man's core is an unidentified element, according to Wily's notes," Blues said. He had his own idea of just what powered the Wilybot and its relation to Blues' own core, but he didn't voice any of that.

X nodded. "Elec, I'm guessing, is stable despite the nature of his core. Ice…when was the last time he recharged?" That they were all either self-sustaining or fueled by sustainable resources hadn't surprised X. Even with Reploids having internal charge tanks, they'd been using alternative energy sources for them since before the start of the Maverick Wars.

"Ice's systems are very conservative of energy, considering where he worked and how weak the sunlight was down there, but he's used the charge pod in the room at least once since he came, though we had to splice a cable to get it to work." Rock smiled a bit guiltily, "We're running out of cables with viable ports."

Harpuia and Phantom, finally finished with their work, moved back towards X, Phantom carefully concealing the kunai as he moved so that when he finally stood at X's side, the only sign of armament was the beam katana handle tucked against the small of his back and the busted Cross Star dangling from his hip armor. "We're done, Father," he said.

"You need a training deck," Harpuia noted. "I'm shocked that there isn't one."

X shook his head. "The maintenance labs were a higher priority. That aside, you're saber users. Most of the units in the Resistance are trained with firearms, which is why we have a firing range on the fifth level."

"That'll be problematic with Master Zero's skillset taken into consideration," Harpuia noted.

"Not really," X corrected. "Zero could run through all his weapon and form cadences without moving a step and still be in top form."

"I bet he has a lot of drills he does, then," Rock said, reaching up and taking Blues' hand, the elder robot tilting his head toward Rock slightly. "Though I never really sparred like that." He was either playing or fighting, never play-fighting.

"He used to, but then again, he trained the Zeroth and a lot of our recruits. Now? He's only got two weapons, and only one of which he's actually used to drilling with," not that there _were_ drills for buster pistols anyway. "I should try to push him to get back into that habit, though. It'll be good for him whether or not it triggers any of his memories."

"Wait," Phantom said, "are you talking about the saber cadences that you taught us?"

X nodded. "I learned those from Zero after the Eurasia Incident."

"The…" Harpuia looked to his father, confusion evident on his face, "Wasn't the Eurasia—"

X nodded, but the look in his eyes silenced the Guardian.

"That means we could train with him," and there was excitement in Phantom's voice. "We know all the drills."

X looked to Blues then, brow creasing in concern, and he reached across the link with his brother, catching the Robot Master's attention. '_Blues, when Phantom and Shadow first got back with Harpuia, Elec mentioned that Harpuia reactivating set off defensive protocols. What happened?_'

Actually, said defense protocols were currently triggered and tracking Harpuia, monitoring his movements and status. Blues frowned at X's query, but responded after a moment, '_This unit is one of the ones that was present when Rock's parts were ordered cannibalized into me. I have filed him accordingly._' As an enemy. '_His coming into the base was equal to a direct attack. The protocol to wake me fully was well underway when Elec arrived to cancel it._' Elec was no longer authorized to cancel anything, not after knocking him out and keeping him down for _ten days_.

It took a great deal of self-control for X's worry to not show on his face, but he was sure that Blues and Rock (and the other three Robot Masters he was linked to) had certainly felt it, and X sighed heavily over the link. '_You've still got my eldest son listed as a hostile? Blues, after Phantom explained the situation, why do you still have…Are Leviathan and Fefnir marked the same?_' There was panic in his voice.

"Father, should we go downstairs and see if Master Zero is awake yet?" Harpuia asked.

'_They are._' Blues' response was short and slightly curt. And no, he was not going to change their setting just to make X feel better.

Rock's eyes widened for an instant before he forced his face into a relatively calm expression, glancing up to Blues, then to X. He felt X's worry and how Blues was beginning to edge into annoyed, and then Harpuia asked about Zero and…

And Blues' defenses swelled, even though the Robot Master didn't move, even though there was no physical change to him whatsoever. Phantom was marked at roughly where Zero had been before the attack—still as possibly hostile, but probably not—but Harpuia? Definite hostile. And the unit would need to provide reason for Blues to change it, reason other than promises and a supposed familial bond.

Blues learned just how cheap words were centuries ago.

'_He's not going to attack you, Blues,_' X tried to reassure the unit, '_and, unlike Phantom, did not come here of his own volition, so what…_' Oh. '_You think he still has ties to the city because he didn't come here for the same reasons as Phantom? Blues, he's my _son_. He's not going to do anything that would benefit the city, not when he knows the unit in command isn't me._'

"Father?" Phantom asked, noticing how silent his father was.

Harpuia moved closer to X, resting a hand near the elf's shoulder. "Father, are you alright?"

"I'll be fine," X answered. "I just…I need a minute."

"Should we go back downstairs?" Harpuia asked.

X responded by turning to look at Blues, the look in his eyes questioning 'well, should they?'

'_Do what you will,_' Blues told X, his sunglasses making it impossible to even see where his gaze was focusing, whether he was actually looking at Harpuia or Phantom, or if he was looking into the distance. He had ways to prevent Neo Arcadia from sensing him, from sensing his core, and he and Rock needed to spend some time up here to evaluate his core. As for what X and the two Guardians did? So long as they didn't impede him, interrupt or upset his day, then really, it didn't matter.

"Downstairs, both of you. Go ahead and check on Zero if you want. If you're going to try and get him to do saber cadences, you might want to borrow someone's lab for the time being."

Both of the Guardians stared at X for a long moment, hearing the quiet tension in his voice, but both bowed and moved for the doorway, quickly dropping down the ladder shaft and heading further into the base.

Normally, Blues would have taken this as a sign that the discussion was over and led Rock further from the base's entrance, but Rock was quietly informing Blues over their link that he upset X and that, right now, walking away would send all the wrong signals, even if Blues really didn't think that any of this was up for debate or discussion.

Inwardly, Rock was praying that X wouldn't start yelling again.

X remained silent, the links with the Robot Masters falling just as quiet.

It was bad enough he'd had to deal with friends going Maverick during the wars. To know that his _family_ was now one misstep away from waging their own mini-war? X was sorely tempted to head back to Cyberspace and scream at the emptiness until he felt better. Screaming certainly wouldn't do any good on _this_ plane.

Rock reached out to X, asked permission for a private communications link. Normally, Rock would just have spoken, but with X in his current mood…but no, X was upset and Blues was becoming irritated and if something wasn't done, this wouldn't end well.

X looked to Rock for a moment, verifying the link and trying very hard to keep his voice calm. '_Yes?_' he asked.

Rock's grip on Blues' hand tightened ever so slightly at X's terse tone. He wasn't even looking up at the Cyber Elf; he was staring very hard ahead of them, at the horizon. '_Please don't be too angry,_' though Rock knew that X was angry, knew that X was affronted that Blues was slotting his children so, '_but I know that you likely told Blues that they're your sons and, therefore, are harmless. And I know that if you told him that, that he'd essentially discard your argument. That kind of data won't sway him. Blues…he refuses to put any value into human-style familial relationships because whenever he did, whenever he _did_ trust, whenever he _did_ but himself out there, he was hurt badly. The people he should have been able to trust completely…_' and Rock's voice shook here, part of him still unable to reconcile any of this with the Doctor Light he'd known, the Doctor Light he loved, '_Did everything to demonstrate that Blues' trust was worthless, that his being was worthless, that his love meant _nothing_._' Though now, Rock understood that Doctor Light honestly hadn't meant to hurt Blues and that, in hindsight, had been absolutely horrified and disgusted once he was finally able to understand what he'd done to his eldest son. Had Blues been a human boy, Doctor Light would have lost custody and all contact. He'd have been thrown into prison. '_So using words like 'son', using human familial relationships won't sway him. It's like saying…like saying that the animal won't bite, even if you stick your hand in its mouth. It sounds incredibly stupid to him if only because he's been bitten so many times before. He doesn't believe in words, he doesn't believe in saying things like 'I love you' or 'You're important to me' because, when it would have mattered, it was all a sham. He only believes in actions, in proof. He believes in demonstrations. He won't change his mind until proof is given._'

'_There's no proof my son can give, then,_' and X apologized for his tone a moment later. '_Blues seems to make a living off of being impossible, and while I can't fault him for it, knowing what your era was like, having an idea of some of the things he had to suffer through…it _hurts_, Rock. It hurts to know that my eldest brother is willing to kill my children over something so simple as them being bound to my copy's orders. When faced with the option of absolute compliance or death, what would any sane individual chose? Phantom explained that Copy X was willing to retire them for the sake of arguing that you and Blues were worth more effort, was willing to kill units that he should have known were 'his' children over something so asinine and…_' Now X looked physically upset, but he bit back the desire to start venting his frustrations. '_To be forced to keep my family separated, to keep my son away from my brother, because I fear for my child? No family should be that way, but family is all I know, all I have left. Trust in my sons is given freely, especially because I know they realize what's going on now, what's at stake in all of this. I programmed them. I helped build them. I know them, raised and cared for them, until I became _this_,_' and he motioned toward himself. '_But I don't know Blues. I don't know what he considers a valid demonstration, and I'm honestly shocked beyond words that he changed Phantom's designation,_' or at least hoped that Blues wasn't still targeting his youngest.

'_He seems impossible, and he seemed impossible to me, too, until we linked fully for the first time._' After that? Blues made a whole lot more sense. But X couldn't link that way, couldn't feel who Blues was that way. '_He was always willing to…willing to do whatever it took to get things done. You saw what he did to Ice and Elec for undermining him. X, he _likes_ them._' So what Blues did to units he didn't like? '_But he likes you, too, and he's obviously willing to give them a chance because of that._' It certainly wasn't for Phantom and Harpuia's sake. '_Those orders in Neo Arcadia—compliance or death—is what the Three Laws are to him. They're coded to be a death sentence should he ever break the First Law, X. No one else's is so brutal. So to him, saying that you were too afraid to do the right thing, too afraid to do what's right because someone might kill you? That's no argument. To Blues, having your will and using it to do what you believe in is of far more value than your life._' The fact that it was Rock that was being cannibalized didn't help with Blues' opinion of either nephew. '_He doesn't necessarily think that they should have died to tell the copy no, but it really…he doesn't understand how the copy is still in power when everyone else in that city has more power than him. He doesn't understand why they're letting the copy master them when he's so inept._' And if the Master was lacking, then it was no Master.

'_The copy is still in power because those idiots in the city shut me away, turned me into a fu…turned me into a god amongst men and machine, idolized me instead of letting me help. I had Neo Arcadia Tower built as it is, rising so high above the rest of the city, because I wanted it to be seen no matter where you were in Neo Arcadia. Let it be a beacon of hope, let it be a sign that we were still looking out for those who had been lucky or cursed enough to survive,_' depending on how you looked at it, '_and the people turned it into an ivory tower, into a prison. They want me to have no direct part in the city but to rule it and save them all from what happened to this planet. And before you start wondering, no, it wasn't just the humans. The Reploids were more vocal about this than them, content to see me as a legend and not a person. I still don't understand why I let them. Maybe it was because I was sick and damned tired of being pushed away when all I offered was a helping hand, a comforting embrace, when I tried to give them what I couldn't during the wars._' That they saw X as infallible had much to do with the reason Copy X wasn't questioned. '_Even the Judges deferred to me, as if the words of one unit could and should hold sway over the minds of eight._' X looked to Blues for a moment before returning his gaze to the ground at his feet. '_If he holds so little value in words and emotions and family,_' and X could at least understand why, '_what hope do any of us have of showing Blues that we aren't like the people that hurt him?_'

For a moment, X considered activating his Cloaker abilities so Rock wouldn't have to see him breaking like he was.

'_He holds a lot of value in emotion. Don't—don't ever think he doesn't. His displays are off, not his ability to feel,_' and Rock thought that that was just as painful. '_And…he does hold a lot of value in bonds between people, even if he doesn't subscribe to that concept of family. That…that's why he never ordered me away from Doctor Light, X._' He didn't want to take from Rock what Blues never had, even if every inch of the older Robot Master's being was _screaming_ to get both little units _out of that house_. '_He made certain that we were okay, made sure Doctor Light knew he was watching, but he never interfered._' He didn't come for them until Doctor Light passed away. '_But you wanted to know about proof. Not hurting him, or me, or any of us, will, in time, override the data set he's applying right now. He checks and rechecks what he's ascertained hundreds of times a minute, so when the data points in another direction, he will change his mind. But he won't go on blind faith. Blind faith hurt him too much to trust._'

'_It's because he can't feel us the same way, tap into our minds like he can with the Robot Masters?_' Had X's link been why Blues treated X the way he had?

'_He can't feel the intentions or sincerity of any of the units in this base aside from the other Robot Masters and you, X. He's treating them the same way he does humans. He can't trust them up front, X. He _can't_. He's told you that trust has to be earned, right? With his past, and knowing how we communicate with one another, knowing how integral the linking is…imagine having to communicate with everyone else without using your voice, without using words at all. That's what it's like to us. Imagine having to just pantomime everything out. That's what it feels like. It's all so insufficient, but it's all we can do to get our point across._'

X snorted then. '_And the link would be impossible unless Blues was willing to decrypt their coding and make the programs._' He shook his head. '_I'm just…Blues wants proof that they're not violent, that they don't mean anyone harm, but…if his defenses are responding to Harpuia being in proximity, that's not fixing anything. That's only exacerbating the problem, reinforcing the fact that he can't let himself trust my kids._'

'_Blues gets hurt when he lets his defenses down,_' Rock pointed out: like what happened with Zero. To say that the eldest Robot Master was on edge did not begin to cover it. '_He's not going to fire on them or anything, you saw that: they were training and he didn't arm his buster. In time, if they continue to not be a threat, their threat level will drop. Lack of hostility is proof, after all._'

'_Do we really have time like that? The situation in the city is getting worse and worse as time goes on, and I _know_ Phantom, at least, is going to go after Leviathan as soon as he has an opening to do so. And that's just going to make Blues _more_ upset, especially with Phantom being so nonchalant about dragging his siblings back here._' X's shoulders slumped.

'_The other two aren't queued as high a threat as Harpuia,_' Rock noted as he probed Blues' systems for data. Rock did not fail to note that Blues cut off much of his emotional state from their link. '_They're actually ranked along the same area as Forte was,_' and that was kind of funny, '_And…Blues is used to being upset. Don't put anything on hold over this, he wouldn't want you to._' If anything, Blues would probably just withdraw into his room and work from there. '_Phantom's young—he doesn't seem to read the air that well, but I can understand it since…I know we think differently, and Blues most differently of all. I'm sorry, X, even if the memories weren't my fault, if I'd been fine when I was reactivated…_' Things would have gone much more smoothly.

'_Don't blame yourself for this,_' and X looked like the thought of Rock blaming himself for any of this was upsetting. That X's logic there was based on the fact that their first encounter had been X screaming through a door didn't help any. '_I don't know why Blues made me lose my cool, lose my head and act like I did, and I still can't wrap my head around half of the decisions he's made, around most of the things he does, but this situation isn't like this because of anything you did or didn't do,_' and, really, if there was anyone to fault in this, it was X himself, and not just for what he'd done in relation to Blues.

'_Just…just know that he's not being malicious, and that he _does_ like you. He does care about you, even if he's not showing it in a way you're used to,_' and that made Rock wonder if this even counted as 'caring' in X's book. If X even recognized it as such. Rock hoped so. '_I just…If I'd been alright, there wouldn't have been as many misunderstandings. There wouldn't have been as many hurt feelings, there wouldn't have been as much yelling._' And now Blues was moving in to dispel Rock's theory that Rock was somehow at fault for any of this. It made Rock smile, albeit a bit shakily, to think that both units were thinking the same thing. '_I don't know if you realized this, but Elec came here because Blues asked him to come and help. Blues did that for your sake. Elec was already slated to come even before…before Blues was hurt._' Blues being hurt just pushed the timetable forward because Rock needed looking after.

'_I know,_' X assured. '_It's just…it feels so wrong that my family is divided like this. Were it not for things going so horribly wrong and _somebody_ manipulating the city in my absence, I'd have still been with my kids in Neo Arcadia, everything that the copy tried to do to you two would never have happened, and Blues wouldn't have had all his experiential data from your era reaffirmed in this one._'

'_Blues doesn't want people to hurt, either,_' no more than Rock or X did, '_and that's why we're working to help you take your city back. It's not right for people to be suffering that way, doubly so when there are solutions that work._' Rock smiled softly, '_So at least the whole family is united for that. Once Blues sees your children more, once he gets a better feeling for who they are, he can begin to take the chance to trust them. But that doesn't mean we can't work together in the here and now. We'll move forward together._'

A sigh trembled across the link, and X knelt by Rock, setting a hand near the Robot Master's shoulder, offering a soft, (if not somewhat pained) smile. '_I'll be able to do a lot more for everyone once I'm back in the city. We'll make things right for everyone once I'm back in control and back in my body._'

Rock smiled up to X, an innocent and hopeful expression, '_And you won't have to stand alone this time._' And Rock meant it as a promise.

Phantom's voice suddenly called out on the public comm net, '_Uncle Rock, can I get a private link please?_'

Rock blinked, but instead of answering on the public network, he reached out to Phantom directly, requesting the connection while remaining cloaked. Before, he'd been pretending to be a Reploid on the network to avoid making the ones in the base uncomfortable, but Rock thought that Phantom should know who and what Rock was a little bit bitter.

And he'd experienced Ice's presence already. They all had.

Once the connection was confirmed and data was allowed to transfer, Rock asked, '_What's wrong?_'

'_I don't want to be a bother, but I wasn't sure if we should come back up with you and Uncle Blues out there and Father so…upset, but…_' and he went silent for a moment. '_Is Father still topside with you, because I think Zero restored something really…He's been staring at his room wall since we got down here and he's not responding._' That Zero was crying was not a detail he felt like conveying.

Alarm flickered through Rock's links, through all of them, and he fed the data to Blues the second his Master queried for it, then turned his attention to his link with X, '_Phantom just requested a link with me, X. He said that Zero restored something…I think you should go downstairs. Phantom sounded upset.'_ And said nothing of how Zero was doing emotionally. A bit of a shiver ran though Rock's signal and he leaned into Blues' side like he had when he was without his memories, relaxing when the elder unit put an arm around Rock's shoulders, sending reassurances.  
>"You should head down," Blues said to X aloud. This was more urgent, so it was okay if X went. "It'll be another hour or so before we finish up here." So if X wanted to continue talking to him or to Rock, they could continue after that.<p>

X maintained the links with his brothers even as he moved for the doorway, diving through the base quickly and heading for Zero's room.

"Zero, what's—" X started, immediately ducking and Hacking Zero as the android suddenly shot to his feet and swung on X. "Whoa! What the hell, Zero?" and he forced Zero to take a few uneven steps backwards.

Phantom and Harpuia had both shot forward, each of them grabbing one of Zero's arms, even as X disengaged the hack.

"Why the _hell_ would you ask that of me?" Zero shrieked. "Why, of all the favors you'd ask of a friend, would you ask _that_? And how did you think I'd agree?"

"Zero, what are you talking—"

"I'm talking about you asking me to kill you!" Zero said, trying to pull away from the Guardians. "I'm talking about you after Final Weapon, after what happened up there, asking me…telling me…X, what the _fuck_ was wrong with your processor back then?"

X's eyes had gone wide when Zero explained exactly which memory files he was referencing, and his heart tightened a bit at the thought of what else that memory file contained.

"How could you ask me to do that when I still had her blood on my hands? How could you say that doing that was a _favor_ not even an hour after I'd _killed her_?"

"Zero, settle down," X said, his halo shifting back to blue, his gaze threatening. "Settle down and _sit down_ or I will _make you_."

Shrugging free of the Guardians' weakening grips, Zero frowned but took a seat regardless.

"How much of the Repliforce War did you restore?"

Zero looked torn, his eyes betraying just how much his systems were conflicted about the entire situation. "From our launch for Final Weapon until just before landing back at base."

"So you remember the end of that cycle, but not the reasons why?"

Zero nodded.

X sighed, dropping into a hover far closer to Zero than either of his sons were comfortable with. "You remembered Iris, then?"

"I…I cared for her," Zero said, looking to X for reassurance.

"You did, and she for you, but…"

"She was Maverick by the end," Zero stated flatly. "Even if she wasn't infected, and I can't even tell from the memory if she was…"

X shook his head. "That's not what I was going to say."

Phantom took a careful step toward the bed, sitting down next to Zero after a moment and cautiously wrapping an arm over the android's shoulders, shocked when Zero leaned into him.

"She said she wanted a world for just us, that she wanted to live in a world for just Reploids," Zero admitted. "Her final words to me after that fight…and then you had the audacity to ask me what you did."

"I had every reason to ask that question," X countered. "We didn't know that I was completely immune until the Eurasia Incident. I still thought…"

Zero waited for X to continue, wiping at his eyes, and then looking to X, "Why does it seem that I'm recovering all the bad memories first? If I…if there was something between Iris and me, why…" and Zero realized what the trigger had been for the memory restoration. "I fucking hate my processor right now."

"It's no reason to be angry at yourself," X said. "When you restore the Red Alert Crisis, you're going to be _livid_ with me. Or the Erasure Incident, for that matter, since that will actually give you more of an idea of who Iris was. And Colonel. Hell, restore the rest of the Repliforce War or any of the five uprisings before then. You're yelling at me without ninety percent of the context as to _why_ I asked you what I did."

"Five?" Zero said. "I thought…"

"Yes, five prior to Repliforce. Sigma's original revolt, the Shadow Hunters, the hacking of Mother Computer, Doctor Doppler's rebellion, and the Erasure Incident." X frowned, "And I'm betting not a one of those incidents has restored."

Zero looked like X had just hit him. "I'm sorry, but it's not something I…I fought at your side and you asked me to kill you." He shook his head. "X, just how did you expect me to handle restoring that?"

"Honestly? I thought with the Elf Wars data restored, you'd get that there's more to all of the older memories than what you might understand at first glance."

"Pardon the interruption," Harpuia said, his wing crests quickly pulling down when the three in the room all turned to him, "but I'm a little lost here, too. Father, you never told us about this," about asking Zero to kill him.

"There are some stories better left in the past," X said, looking to his son, then to Zero, "but it seems like the past will, at least for a while, be coming back to haunt me."

"Sorry," Zero repeated, and Phantom hugged him tighter, silently reassuring him even though he had no way of understanding just how painful and confusing memory databank damage could be.

"Don't worry so much about it. I should have realized that some of those files were going to be hell on your emotions, but you really need to hold back on the wild swinging," even if X couldn't be hit, "and just let me know what restored so I can either provide context or triggers." Really, violence wasn't going to make the past any easier to bear.

"But you asked Zero to kill you," Phantom said. "You asked—"

"You both were told what the Maverick Virus did to people, what it did to those infected. Think about that in relation to how I am; think about what that would have meant to me before I knew I was immune, _truly_ immune, to the virus."

Although their immunity prevented them from actually becoming Maverick, Phantom and Harpuia both paled when they took the Maverick Virus' effects into consideration for both X's systems and their own.

"You two look like someone just logic bombed you," Zero noted.

"Technically," X admitted, "I kind of did."

Harpuia was the first to recover, shuddering a bit and dropping to the bed opposite Phantom. "To have the virus infect you would have been…"

"And _that's_ why I asked Zero," X explained. "Not just because he's my friend, but because he would have been the only unit _strong enough to take me down_."

"Did you ever apologize for that?"

X looked to Zero, half-tempted to roll his eyes. "All things considered, Z, you spent a lot more time apologizing to me for random crap that happened, especially after Lifesaver dumped it on you that you were the original carrier."

"I don't seem like the apologizing type," Zero said.

"You normally weren't. You were the 'I walk in, kill the Maverick, and walk out with a happy grin plastered on my face' type, even after you found out how you were linked to the virus. There were…there were moments, though."

"Because it hit home harder when we lost people close to us?" Zero asked, curious.

"That was part of it, though a bigger bit of it was because I absolutely abhorred fighting." X shrugged, "But that was another life, another lifetime."

"The fact that you've ended up jaded about that screams so many levels of wrong with me," Zero admitted.

"Two centuries of fighting could wreck just about any pacifists' worldview."

"And that scares me because I'm not bothered by it as much," and Zero wondered if that had anything at all to do with how he'd been programmed initially.

Phantom finally let go of Zero, thankful that the android wasn't blankly staring at the wall and crying anymore. "You okay now?"

"It's…it's going to take a minute to get over a bit of what I saw, but…" Zero shook his head. "It's odd, though."

"What is?" Harpuia asked.

"That, in that memory, I asked myself what I was fighting for," Zero admitted, looking to the floor, "and then to know that I answered that question during the fight against Omega." The blond snorted, tried to hold back a laugh, and failed. "Oh, wow. I answered the question by telling that to the body that I was in when she…" Zero shook his head.

"It was still a revelation I was glad you had," X said, smiling, "despite the situation."

"I'm curious to know how fighting against my original body answered a question I asked my dead first love," Zero deadpanned. "Or why the life-altering question and answer sessions happen during critical confrontations."

"Better that than in the middle of a training session. The Zeroth would have never let you live it down."

That seemed to remind the Reploids why they were there in the first place, both of them perking up.

"Oh, that's right! Zero…" And both units looked at each other as they stopped. And stared at each other.

X cracked a smile, figuring the two were either having a stare-down or arguing over local wireless. He wasn't expecting what they did next, though.

Phantom sat back, throwing both hands in the air, and glowered at Harpuia, "Fine, fine, whatever," before leaning forward.

"Ro-sham-bo!" the two called out, hands flicking out into sideways Vs.

And the two units glared at each other again.

"Ro-sham-bo!" Both of them presented clenched fists.

"Ro-sham-bo!"

Another eighteen rounds passed before the brothers finally threw different gestures, and Phantom smiled widely, reaching past Zero to clasp his hand around Harpuia's fist. "I win," he declared before pulling away and turning to Zero. "Father mentioned earlier that you used to do a lot of cadences as part of your training, cadences that he taught us growing up, and we wanted to know if you remembered them or not."

"Saber cadences?" Zero asked. "Not that I'm aware of."

Harpuia and Phantom broke out into twin smiles, though Harpuia was the first to his feet. "C'mon!" he said, reaching one hand out to Zero, "let's see if we can find an open room. We can show you!"

Phantom pushed Zero forward, urging him to his feet, before standing himself, positively beaming with excitement. On the comm net, he was busy sending out messages to Cerveau, Rocinolle, and Dande, asking if anyone was willing to offer their lab or a room for them to train with Zero.

Zero took Harpuia's offered hand to steady himself as he was pushed to his feet, smiling a bit at their exuberance. "For however old you two are, you're certainly acting like kids that can't wait to get to whatever store your father promised to take you to."

"Saber training with you?" Harpuia said incredulously. "To be able to train alongside the legendary _Zero_?"

"It's like making a wish on your birthday candles and having it come true," Phantom said.

Harpuia's eyes went wide at the mention.

"You didn't!" Phantom said, looking at his brother with wide eyes.

"For my seventeenth, yes I did," Harpuia shot back.

"Wow. A wish twenty-three years in the granting." Phantom grinned again, wider this time, as Cerveau responded that one of the storage rooms down the hall on the sixth level was a few small boxes short of empty and should provide enough room for them. "C'mon," he said, darting for the door, "I found somewhere we can go!"

Harpuia was close behind, laughing with his brother as they bolted into the hall, waiting for Zero to follow.

The android smiled for a moment, resting a hand against the soft pulse of energy that was X's left shoulder, "I'll be back once those two have tired themselves out," and patted his sheathed saber as he walked out the door.


	34. Healing the Scars

_Before we get to the chapter-specific A/Ns, we felt it necessary to clarify a detail that has bothered a few of our readers. After their arrivals at the Resistance base, Harpuia and Phantom are both acting, as Blues put it, "Not quite newbuilts anymore, but not really adolescents either." This is not a disparity between their operational and mental age, however, but a prime example of them not taking their work (and the related stresses) home with them. Midnyght has several friends who are in career positions or the military, ranging in age from mid-20s to early 30s, who act as they are expected while on the clock. But get them off the clock and surrounded by friends with a guarantee of a night's fun, and suddenly they're all 15 again, settling disputes with Ro-Sham-Bo and throwing empty soda cans at one another._

_That being said, today's venture in 22XX finally reveals what's wrong with Rock's core, X finds out that Blues has been running major medical operations in his room, and Zero springs a surprise on X's sons. Harpuia makes formal introductions and apologies to Blues, Ciel explains a little more about her crystal research, and a shocking revelation occurs when a second opinion is asked for in regards to the Energen crystals._

_Oh, and Minuet makes a new friend!_

* * *

><p>It was too bad they didn't gather energy by heating up, even if there were Robot Masters who did. Blues' core constantly radiated energy, but Rock's was more like a battery. He needed to charge and while yes, he could do it off of Blues' core or even Elec's, they both would feel better knowing that Rock could function self-sufficiently. There was no shortage of sunlight in this desert though, and once X went downstairs, Blues settled in the shade of one of the ruined, dilapidated walls—it looked like this was part of a larger compound once—and Rock laid down on the cracked ground, in full sunlight, and closed his eyes, shielding his sensitive optics from the harsh glare.<p>

It didn't take long for the warmth to seep through his systems, slowing his processors slightly and causing his status over the links to feel contented and sleepy. It was warm and nice here, and he was actually outside, and he was charging, even if not nearly as much as he should be. He focused his systems on his core and energy storage systems, logging every tiny detail for later scrutiny. Until then, it was almost like a nap. It was nice.

Blues may have joined him, but he overheated more easily and his systems didn't benefit from sunlight exposure, but he stayed near, accepting a continual stream of status updates and data from Rock's systems, slowly building up a picture of what was going on in Rock's body.

Time crawled by slowly, an hour creeping past, the sun moving further westward, toward the distant horizon. In the past, Rock thought, there'd have been more sound: the drone of bees or cicadas, the sound of birds, of leaves rustling in trees, but here? It was silent, save for the occasional breeze blowing through and his own system noises. It was so _lonely_.

At least his links with his brothers and Shadow meant that it wasn't so lonely, even if the outside didn't sound _right_.

"The rate isn't improving," Rock said after nearly an hour and a half of silence, opening his eyes to gaze sleepily at the sky. There were some clouds now, high up in the atmosphere.

"I think this data will be sufficient," came Blues' even reply. He couldn't say he was pleased with the results, but they really shouldn't sit and analyze it up here. Staying out this long was risky.

Rock pushed himself into a sitting position, waiting a few moments before getting to his feet, still a bit groggy as he headed over to Blues. Rock wasn't quite overheated, wasn't anywhere near a dangerous level, but his overall mental state would be akin to someone after an interrupted nap.

The drastic shift of temperature once they reentered the base was a welcome relief, even if Rock did shiver for a moment before vetoing that physical status display.

X reached out over the link, fortifying his connections with the two Robot Masters once he felt the shift in the link. '_Rock, are you okay?_' he asked, having some difficulty translating the feeling coming off of the younger robot.

Rock was a bit slow to react, as though it took his processors longer to register the message and respond to it. He blinked sleepily for a moment or two, then sent X a contented feeling along with his response, '_I'm okay. Is something wrong?_'

'_You feel a little different across the link,_' X responded. '_How did things go topside? Any improvement with your core?_'

It took Rock a moment to respond again, although it was slightly quicker this time. '_Oh. I was laying in the sun for a long time, so I got pretty warm and it slowed my processor speed. I'm kinda sleepy…_' Rock was quiet for several moments longer, seeming to take a moment to revel in the feeling, and Blues had to take his arm and guide him along. Perhaps he'd gotten a bit warmer than he should have. '_But I'm getting almost nothing back from the exposure. Blues and I came back inside to do the analysis._' Well, it'd be mostly Blues doing the analysis until Rock cooled off and woke up.

'_Ah, okay,_' X said, a happy lilt to his voice even if he was a bit surprised to hear that the time spent in the sun had made the robot lethargic. Another change between their designs, he supposed. '_Heading back down to your room?_' he asked after a moment.

'_We are. Do you want to come?_' Rock sounded a bit excited at the prospect.

'_Sure,_' X answered back almost immediately. '_The base is running pretty decently, everyone's got something they're working on, and the kids will probably be running through cadences with Zero for another hour or two,_' especially if they were going through _all_ of the saber forms. '_Let me know when you and Blues get to the room. I'll head for the sixth level access points and eject from the terminal in your room if that's okay with you and Blues._'

A happy, warbling feeling emanated from Rock's side of the link, like he was giggling, delighted, and his voice was a bit rushed when he responded, '_We're taking the lift now, so we'll be there in under a minute!_'

There was no way he was able to hold still; he had to be _bouncing_ on that lift.

Rock was fully awake and alert now and pulled Blues along, practically dragging him all the way to the room, and he sent to X the _second_ they passed through the door.

X hit the exit point and ejected from the terminal, manifesting just in time to see Rock launch happily for the bed, Blues dragged behind the exuberant youth. '_How did things go?_' he sent to Blues as he looked to Rock. "You sound more awake now."

Rock smiled as he flopped back on the bed, bright-eyed and alert. "My internal temperature's returned to optimal." His cooling systems were nothing if not efficient and so, he was back to normal in short order.

Blues took his trench coat off, folding it carefully as he responded to X, '_He's not picked up a charge from exposure, but his core is holding a charge and he can receive energy via a solid link._' So something was wrong with reception and not with the core's ability to hold and store energy. '_I think I know what the problem is,_' and Blues' voice was a bit flat here and had he been more expressive, he'd have rubbed his temple. Really, this was something he should have realized off the bat.

X turned to Blues fully then. "What's wrong?" And was it anything that he or the Resistance could help with?

Blues set his trench coat on the foot of the bed as Rock squirmed on the bed, wriggling out of his vest without fully sitting up to take it off properly. After a moment's consideration, the older Robot Master answered X's question, "As part of the maintenance set I performed on Rock to bring him back to fully optimal condition, I had to completely reskin him." And the Resistance was very generous to donate that material, Blues thought, "But in hindsight, you told me that this base only just started using solar energy, that it is a relatively new option here, and that Neo Arcadia itself isn't using it at all." Or if they were, not in a large enough scale to be worth the time. "I realized while we were on the surface that the synthetic skin in this era wouldn't have a solar panel system threaded into it. Without that, and without your armor," and Blues turned his head to speak to Rock now, "there's not much surface area left to absorb the energy by."

In short, Rock needed to be reskinned again, but this time with the proper material.

As an afterthought, Blues added, "But I'm going to take a look at your core here to be sure." So Rock should take the shirt off too so Blues could get at his access panel.

"Wait, wait," X said, moving a bit between Rock and Blues, "you're going to do as invasive a procedure as opening up his core in…Blues, we can get Cerveau or Rocinolle to provide space in the lab." And there was an edge of panicked worry in the elf's voice.

"That's not necessary," Blues replied evenly, already rolling up his sleeve as Rock pulled his shift off per Blues' instructions. "I did all previous maintenance on him—and myself—in this room." He didn't make use of _any_ of the labs, not even while everyone slept.

X sputtered out some sort of retort, but with the confusion and worry cutting across his thoughts, nothing of what he said made any sort of sense. After a moment, he fell silent, moving to a spot near the bed, his halo locking on red as he queried for a full status link with Rock. Even if Blues insisted on something so outside of standard procedure, he was going to keep a close eye on his brother. Dropping into a hover near the bed, he remained silent as Blues began his work.

Rock strengthened his link with X, tried to reassure the Cyber Elf: he trusted Blues with this. He knew what he was doing, unorthodox as the location was. The child did allow X's request, the data flow shifting to give X a constant, real-time feed on Rock's status.

Once Rock laid back and was settled on that swath of cloth he'd been bundled in when Blues first arrived, Blues enabled his variable system, his sleeve rolled back to prevent the fabric from ripping as he opened Rock's access panel, not hesitating at all, like this was something he did every day.

Like this was standard procedure.

It took only a matter of seconds for Blues to remove the protective cover over the core. If they'd been planning on changing parts out or doing any real maintenance, he'd have ordered Rock offline, but he needed to see the device running to ascertain whether it was in good condition. He needed to know if it needed to be replaced.

The core was humming gently, a constant, low thrum as it emitted a soft glow in places, dim lights to indicate status rather than any actual energy sparking outward. Blues accessed one of the panels beside it, unscrewing its cover and plugging into it with his variable system, sending very low, constant streams of power into it, like what would happen when it was charging, and watching its reaction. The light shifted, becoming slightly stronger, and the hum quieted even as a second hum began, softer now despite the parts moving faster.

Rock's eyes were closed even though he was fully awake, holding completely still to let Blues work, feeding full status updates to both X and Blues.

X watched the update and Rock carefully, maintaining his quiet hover as he watched Blues work, elevating himself only enough to get a clearer look at Rock's core.

Some small part of him was thankful that Lifesaver's model type had been replaced in the later years of the Elf Wars by individual units training as medics and mechanics. The way Lifesaver and his production line had been, the way they thought? X would _never_ have heard the end of it for letting Blues do this, older model or otherwise.

Blues was acutely aware of X's continuing disapproval and, really, it was mirroring the disapproval that Elec was focus-beaming to Blues. Perhaps the two of them could get together and commiserate. It certainly wouldn't change Blues' mind. After a few more minutes of poking around in Rock and testing the core, the eldest Robot Master nodded, finally satisfied. "It's receiving and holding energy just fine."

X nodded softly: he'd seen similar data in the feeds he got from Rock. "So there's nothing wrong with his core at all, then. It's all an energy transference issue because of his synthetic dermal layer." X frowned a bit. "Would we need all new material, or would you be able to do the threading with existing synth-skin?"

Blues frowned for a moment, pondering as he closed Rock up. "It'll be easiest to use new material," since it was unlikely that they had the solar cell type used in the synthetic skin to begin with. Making it and then threading it, or having the finished material sent? It wasn't a contest.

"You going to ask Shadow and Phantom to hit the city again?" Since they'd done such an impressive job with the last raid, it seemed only logical to ask. "Or would you be going into the city?"

Blues hesitated for an instant as Rock sat up and began to pull his shirt back on. "I will send Shadow along to retrieve the materials."

X nodded, his halo finally shifting back to the kaleidoscopic spectrum as he moved to sit on the couch near a sleeping Minuet once Rock verified across the link that he was alright. "Any chance of you at least using the lab for _that_ procedure?" Really, they needed to be doing this somewhere that _wasn't_ Blues' room.

"I will consider it," Blues said, if only to satisfy X enough for him to drop it.

Rock smiled sheepishly.

* * *

><p>Zero deactivated his saber, the shimmering green blade dissipating before he sheathed the weapon, and he bowed to the two Guardians. "Thank you very much," he said, having had to delay at least half a dozen files for restoration during the course of their training. And now that he had the cadences memorized? He'd be training a lot more often.<p>

And along that thread, he messaged Cerveau to ask if it was okay for them to mark the room off for training instead of storage so that the three of them had someplace to go to train and blow off steam.

Phantom and Harpuia were both beaming as they bowed to Zero.

"It was an honor to train with you," Phantom said.

Harpuia agreed wholeheartedly. "And well worth the twenty-three years of waiting."

"We'll have to do this more often," Zero said. "If I'm expected to be heading any part of an attack against the city," and he smirked, "the members of my new Zeroth Unit better damn well be able to keep up with me."

The Guardians looked two seconds away from processor overload.

"Generals," Zero said, snapping to attention, fighting down a smile as both Phantom and Harpuia responded in kind, saluting him.

"Lieutenant Commander!" they chorused out as he saluted.

"Dismissed," Zero said, dropping his hand and turning for the door.

The two stood in silence for a while, even after Zero had left the room, until Phantom reached over and pinched Harpuia.

"Ouch!" Harpuia cried, resting one hand over the offended arm. "What was that for?"

Phantom offered his arm. "Well, at least we proved _you're_ not dreaming."

Harpuia grinned as he pinched Phantom in return.

Phantom bit back a yelp of pain, smiling despite it. "Part of me still doesn't believe it."

"Which part? The 'we just got to train with Master Zero' part or the 'we're suddenly part of the Zeroth'?

"Both?" Phantom said, pulling his helmet off, shaking his hair a bit before running one hand through the locks.

"So, now what?" Harpuia asked.

"I'm not entirely…"

And he stopped dead.

"Phantom?" Harpuia asked, worried. "You okay?"

"You never got formally introduced to Uncle Blues." Had that been why he'd been so distant with them earlier? Well, not that Phantom regarded his distance as anything out of the ordinary, but…

"I'm guessing almost running into him in a hallway and then saying hi this morning doesn't count?"

"I said _formally_," Phantom returned. "Like we sort of were with the rest of our uncles."

"Well," Harpuia said, pulling his own helmet off, "let's stop off at Father's room first. From the way Uncle Blues was watching us this morning during our sparring session…it'd probably be for the best that we left our weapons."

Phantom's hand drifted to his Cross Star. "You still need to fix one of mine."

Harpuia rolled his eyes. "I'll ask Cerveau or Rocinolle for parts later. Stop whining like I broke your favorite toy."

"I'm not whining. What happened during the spar was just unnecessary on your part."

"This from the unit that recoded his eyes and screwed with my head when trying to lure me beneath Sub Arcadia."

"You think that was bad," Phantom said with a leer, "wait until you hear what I have planned for when we go to get Levi."

"She's going to kill you," Harpuia shot back. "You know she probably thinks _you_ killed _me_."

"That was kind of the point of having mock-ups of your sabers made and then leaving them stuck to the wall with kunai when Shadow-sensei and I grabbed you."

Harpuia stared at Phantom for a good long while in silence.

"What?" Phantom asked, finally annoyed by his brother's unwavering stare.

"Leviathan is going to _murder _you and paint Father's room with whatever of your internals she doesn't scrap in the process," Harpuia stated matter-of-factly.

Phantom huffed, turning for the door. "Let's just go already."

It only took a moment for them to stop off in X's room, leaving their weapons and helmets neatly arranged on one of the tables before heading down the hall, Phantom running a hand over the fob to verify it was Blues' room before knocking.

Blues and Rock both froze when there was knocking on the door. Knocking meant it wasn't X because he made it chime, and it wasn't Elec or Ice because they'd just undo the lock and let themselves in.

And Shadow did not use the door.

And now Blues was out of units he'd actually welcome into the room.

Several long seconds ticked by, but Blues returned to his typing. He'd resumed his manual hacking attempts on the security network and in a rare bout of helpfulness was compiling a list of each and every weakness he'd encountered, weaknesses a _human_ could figure out, to have sent to the security team.

Well, they_ did _want to know how to fortify themselves. Best to start with shapes and numbers and work their way up.

It fell to Rock to undo the lock in lieu of answering the door, settling on the bed as it slid open, the little unit smiling when he saw who it was, even if his stress levels on the network spiked a bit.

Blues' spiked more than a bit. For this, he did actually stop typing again, pushed back from the console and turned to face their unexpected guests.

"Are you two exploring the base?" Rock's voice was bright, his expression curious as he greeted the two Guardians.

The entire time they'd been waiting for the door to open, Phantom was busy glaring at Harpuia, a heated argument bouncing back and forth over their local wireless, and Harpuia snorted and shrugged, a curt '_Fine!_' tossed across their communications link, just before the door slid open.

Phantom bowed. "Not exactly, Uncle Rock. I…I thought it be best if we come by since I realized that Harpuia hasn't been formally introduced." And he nudged his brother across their link.

Harpuia looked to Rock, then Blues, before bowing deeply. "Hajime mashite, Blues-dono, Rock-dono," he intoned softly.

Rock smiled, though it was somewhat bittersweet, and he returned the bow, though not as deeply. Blues only nodded. "Hajime mashite," Rock answered in return, even if it technically wasn't their first meeting. At least being so respectful meant they _cared_ about what he and Blues thought. That, Rock thought, would only help.

Harpuia and Phantom both knelt on the floor, resting back into sitting positions, Phantom looking to the floor for a moment as he shot Harpuia a quick message along their link, practically slamming it in his face as to _why_ Blues was acting like he was.

And the Rekku General certainly felt like a bit of an idiot for not recognizing Phantom's point sooner. "I…" he began, looking to Rock and feeling that twinge of familiarity again in seeing just how much this unit looked like X. "I'm sorry," he said, eyes dancing between Rock and Blues. "I know that what we allowed to happen in Neo Arcadia is beyond reprehensible, beyond forgivable, but I am honestly sorry that we could not do more to sway Copy X and change his mind." That they'd allowed it at all spoke volumes about just how much they feared their 'father' signing their death warrants over even the simplest of matters.

Rock's smile was encouraging, but Blues was the one to respond this time. It spoke volumes to him that these units were willing to bow down and apologize, even if his first impression was…

"That facsimile will not remain in power for much longer," and, really, the way Blues said it, it was a _decree_. It wasn't even a pledge to try, a promise to help. No. When Neo Arcadia was sieged, they would be the ones to come out victorious, without a doubt. 'Trying' was not a concept that Blues often subscribed to. Trying left room for failure and, in the end, you either did it or you didn't.

Harpuia nodded. "That he's been in power for four years when we, at least," and he motioned to himself and Phantom, although he internally included their other siblings, "should have recognized that something was wrong worries me. That he's been able to turn the city into what he has…" Harpuia shook his head. "When the day comes for us to reclaim the city, my blades will serve my father's cause even if it means breaking the oath I made to the city."

"The oaths we made then were to protect the city and those within from all that would bring it harm. To be part of Father's Resistance does not break that," Phantom noted. "We just never expected the corruption to come from within."

Rock nodded, although they were right: it was absolutely unbelievable that a copy could get by for four years with no one noticing. "We think that there's someone supporting the copy from behind and that that's partly why he's been able to go on for as long as he has."

"If there is, they've done an excellent job of hiding themselves where even we were unaware of their presence," Harpuia said. "Then again, we did not…spend as much time with the copy as we would have with Father, so there were chances where the individual would have had opportune time to make contact without alerting anyone."

"The thing that worries me most if there was contact between this agent and Copy X is the fact that the Zan'ei should have been able to detect and monitor any transmissions. They're either being blocked without any of us knowing or being threatened into silence."

"As willing as the Council and Copy X are to hand out Orders of Retirement?" Harpuia said, turning to his brother, "it's likely that the latter is more likely."

Phantom's eyes narrowed. "To not know something like this from my own troops," and he sighed. "Things will be set to right when the city is ours again."

"It shouldn't be a place where people have to live in fear," Rock agreed, even if he had no conscious memories of the city at all. Out of all the Robot Masters, only Blues and Shadow had actually been there while awake. But from what Rock was hearing from the Reploids in this base, it was rapidly decaying into a true hell on Earth.

Phantom looked to Blues for a moment, considering, before, "Uncle Blues, I have been unable to establish a communications link with Shadow-sensei…and I wanted to ask you if it would be possible for Shadow-sensei to assist my brother and me in collecting our sister at some point within the next few days."

Blues nodded after a moment. "I'll allow you to borrow him." Shadow was gone, getting the materials needed for Rock's care, but in the meantime…well, this time Phantom at least had the sense to ask permission. If he was being practical—and practicality was pre-programmed—then he knew that it'd make sense to remove as many of X's children from the enemy board as they could before the strike. It'd not only cut the enemy's strength, but having four figureheads standing against the government? The citizens would be more likely to not take up arms against the Resistance.

"Thank you," Phantom said, bowing his head. He turned to Harpuia, giving the elder AXR a glance that seemed to ask if Harpuia had any intention of talking.

"Blues-dono," Harpuia said after a moment, "once again, I apologize for what happened in the city, and I…I humbly request to know if there is anything that I can do to atone for the wrong committed against you and Rock-dono." If he was to apologize, _truly_ apologize to his uncles, he knew that words only went so far, so to seek the means of earning their forgiveness would achieve far more than sitting here and simply talking would.

"Just do what you can to assist with the efforts here," Blues said. Honestly, he wouldn't mind it one bit if Harpuia and Phantom both did their thing, but did it _over there_, and not over here. Distance would be a nice bonus, except no, that'd upset X. And an upset X didn't fit well into his calculations.

Harpuia nodded, he and Phantom both getting to their feet and bowing respectfully to the Robot Masters. "Take care," Harpuia said, smiling softly towards Rock before turning and leaving the room, Phantom waving as he turned and followed his brother out.

"Well, that went well," Phantom chirped after they'd returned to X's room.

"Let's just hope that Uncle Blues takes well to Leviathan and Fefnir if he's that…" and Harpuia shuddered a bit, "toward us."

Blues turned back to the console once the door slid shut, its lock scrambling, but Rock frowned at it for several moments. He wasn't going to reproach Blues for being so cold toward the units; he _was_ being very considerate by Blues' standards. The only problem was that no one here knew Blues, so they were only applying his actions toward their own standards.

Rock wanted all of them to get to know the older unit better, but with things the way they were? It wasn't going to happen any time soon. He knew Blues was thinking it wouldn't be smart to rush into any friendships, and really, Rock thought, the only thing they could do was give Blues time. He sorely wished they had that much time.

* * *

><p>"Alright, so," Elec said, frowning at the crystal data he'd compiled. He was back in Ciel's lab, working on analysis and research. "I have a question." Because this had been bothering him. It'd been bothering him because it didn't make any <em>sense<em>.

Ciel looked up from her computer terminal, pushing her visor up as she turned to the unit that had addressed her. "What is it?"

Alouette was busying herself on the other side of the room, talking amicably at one of the younger Animal Elves while it busied itself eating a few Energen Crystals.

"I understand wanting to research these crystals for the benefit of the Cyber Elves," and Elec made a loose gesture toward the Animal Elf Alouette was chattering with, "but why are you so set on applying them to the power plant? The energy levels you're telling me Neo Arcadia needs are well within the capabilities of a plant that size, and wouldn't it be best to ration them toward the units that actually need them for continued survival?"

"The main reason I've concerned myself with using these for the power plant was to deal with the problems with the system itself. Now that we know it's just a matter of someone screwing with the system, it's more of…it's more along the lines of using it to increase the output further, see if we can't start setting up satellite biodomes to the one over Neo Arcadia. There's going to be a point when the population levels are going to exceed what the city can take, so to provide people with somewhere safe to go? And that doesn't even touch upon the idea of sending units back out across the planet to restart the environmental reclamation projects." She grabbed one of the crystals from her drawer. "Combine these crystals with portable energy storage tanks and the reclamation teams would have more than enough power for months of terraforming work, for all the things they have to do in order to undo the damage from the Elf Wars. Some small bits of work have already been done, but the power issue and the resurgence of the Maverick crisis made it difficult to continue."

"If the population burgeons to that point, it'd be better to build multiple power plants instead of keeping all your eggs in one basket," Elec pointed out. If something went horribly wrong and a plant _offlined_? There needed to be alternate options, off-site options. "And what about rationing these? From your description, the Cyber Elves can and do burn themselves out. Wouldn't it be better to save the crystals for them?"

Ciel and Alouette both looked at Elec curiously, the young Reploid quickly returning her attention to the cute little elf in her care, and Ciel shook her head. "I don't understand why you keep insisting on rationing the crystals. There's more than enough deposits, even if the Resistance doesn't have a hold on any of the active mines."

Now Elec frowned, "You've been speaking as though they're rare." Perhaps grabbing a mine would be Priority Two after taking Neo Arcadia.

"The only thing that makes them rare for us is that we have to steal them from the city or get them from Resistance agents in the city who, technically, are still stealing them. Neo Arcadia controls all of the Energen mines on the planet, even if there are only about…Alouette, can you send a message to Hirondelle and ask him what the last report said about the mines?"

"Sure thing, Sis!" Alouette answered, quickly sending off the message. "I'll let you know when he answers!"

"Thank you," and she returned her gaze to Elec. "Neo Arcadia uses them as much for Cyber Elves as we do, though I've seen how little they tend to care for the ones they create." What Anubis Necromancess did with the elves was beyond reprehensible, something she tried very hard not to think about. "And, as I've said before, they way Reploids are built now, they can process the crystals in much the same manner."

"Sis, Mister Hirondelle said the last reports from Miss Neige indicated twenty-six active mines."

"Thank you, Alouette," Ciel said. "So, yeah, over two dozen active crystal mines, and those are all just on the Eurasian landmass. That's not even touching on the other continents."

"We'll have to ensure they're secured after Neo Arcadia is," Elec said, mostly musing to himself. His gaze returned to Ciel when he spoke again, "Either way, if you want to expand the city and reclaim the planet, help it heal, you're going to need more than one plant. There are other ways to harness power outside of geothermal energy, as I'm sure you're aware, and pouring amplifiers into one facility is just fine, but you'll need something more reliable than that."

"What, aside from geothermal and solar, did you have in mind, if anything?" Ciel asked. "And I was aware we were going to need more than one plant eventually, I was just…" She blushed a bit, fiddling with a bit of her hair nervously. "I did mention that this wasn't my field of expertise."

"No, it's alright," Elec reassured her. He knew that Ciel wasn't an expert here. "There are several options. Renewable resources like wind and water can provide power. And there's always nuclear energy," nuclear being the main plant type Elec had been in charge of in 20XX.

"Nuclear was considered too much of a risk considering the condition of the biosphere," Ciel explained. "Master X made a point of addressing that very early on in Neo Arcadia's construction."

"All meltdowns in history are due to _human_ error," Elec said. "There is risk in using it, but there's inherent risk in generating and storing energy no matter what you're doing. _None_ of my nuclear facilities so much as hiccupped while I was managing them." He'd devoted an entire processor to dealing with only the plants.

Ciel nodded. "I guess that's true, but until now, we didn't have anyone capable enough to manage facilities like that. With you, however," and she smiled a bit at the thought. "I know it's not really my place to ask questions, especially after the considerably negative effect my initial one had, but are there any other surviving Robot Masters that have terraforming capabilities?" Since that was also a major concern. "And I know we're going to need to do _something_ about cleaning and repairing the damage to the atmosphere." Part of the reason Neo Arcadia was under the Eden Dome was because of the gaping holes in the ozone layer.

Elec paused at that, frowning slightly, but not in a way that was disapproving of Ciel. Yes, he was willing to lend his power and ability to help out, but it wasn't his right to divulge information like this. There was the safety of others to consider. "I'm afraid I can't answer that question for you," Elec finally said. It wasn't his place.

"It's alright," Ciel said, nodding despite the disappointment she felt at his answer. "It was idle curiosity, and it's not my place to be asking questions like that. I'm sorry."

"It's nothing to be sorry about." He really wasn't one to fault people for their curiosity, especially if she was going to be respecting his boundaries.

It'd have been a lot trickier has she _demanded_ the answer.

"I don't blame you for wanting to know. I've not yet had time to closely examine the surface, though Rock and Blues did feed me data when they were topside a couple hours ago. From what they collected, it sounds like we'll not be short on work for a long while." And yet Elec's tone wasn't despairing or discourages by the findings. Merely determined: there was work to be done.

Ciel's body language shifted drastically at that, her eyes turning to the floor. "We…I'm just so worried that we're not going to be able to reclaim it. We've already lost so many species to the wars that I'm starting to wonder if the only way we're going to manage to survive in the long run is adapting through technorganic advancement. You've probably already seen that a lot of the non-humans here are purely mechanical, and I'm not sure if Master X mentioned the floater colonies, the orbital facilities at all." She stopped, twiddling her thumbs distractedly. "I'm sorry. I just…I don't really bring things up like that."

"It's because Papa used to tell us all the stories of the world before the wars that he heard from his papa," Alouette said, looking to Ciel before turning to Elec. "Papa used to tell us stories about the Hunters and the world before Neo Arcadia and all the stuff that used to live on the planet and that we were working side-by-side with the humans to make sure the world looked like that all over again." The cheer in her voice was unmistakable, Ciel managing a soft smile to weakly mirror the childish grin on Alouette's face.

"I was told that ecosystems planetwide were fairly thrashed by the time X was activated, that the planet didn't look like it had in our time even by that point," and Elec sighed there. "Of course, the planet was fully thriving them. Blues said that it was a desert topside, and noted that it was _not_ a desert the last time he was in the region. He subclassified it as a wasteland, actually," and Elec sort of smirked at that thought. "Do you mind if I call Rock up? I'd like a second scan set done on these crystals, and he's…he's seen and experienced a lot. He may have input on them that I don't."

Ciel raised a finger to her lips as Alouette started to ask if it was okay for her to go somewhere with Rock after they were done, and the young Reploid fell silent. "That's fine," Ciel said. "The more we can do with these crystals, the better."

"His original designation was lab support for Doctor Light, so he's actually very ideal to have in a place like this." Elec sent the summons and smiled a moment later. "He's on his way up. I think he'll be able to get better data with his scans than I can with mine," since Elec wasn't built to be analyzing substances like this.

"So, aside from the application as an alternate power source and an amplifier, do you think we'd be able to start encoding Cyber Elves better with the work you've been doing on the crystals so far?"

"I think so. Once I can get a better handle on the crystal's properties, we can figure out if there's a way to code them more efficiently so that they won't drain their core crystal so quickly. And if they can run more efficiently overall…" Efficiency was the ideal.

Ciel looked to Alouette as the unit loaded the Animal Elf she'd been working with into the storage device she carried. "Alouette, all of your elves are okay in terms of energy levels, right?"

"I've got to feed two more of the Animals and one of the Nurses, but I've got enough crystals for them," she piped up, releasing another elf as she was talking to Ciel.

Ciel turned to the door then, hearing footsteps in the hallway, and she bowed her head as Rock walked it. "It's good to see you again," she said.

A small mass of yellow-orange metal peeked out from behind Rock's legs, copper eyes scanning the room for a moment, before Minuet ran her body against Rock's leg affectionately and let out a soft, contented-sounding "Mrow."

Alouette's attention was torn from the elf in her care, eyes going wide with surprise and delight. "Rock, you brought your kitty!" And she leaned down, reaching one hand out towards the feline unit. "Here, kitty, kitty!" she said, trying to get the cat to come to her.

Minuet looked at the Reploid curiously, tilting her head to the side before turning to look at Rock. Another soft meow, this time sounding almost like the unit was asking for permission, and Minuet held still for a moment before bounding over to the Reploid and purring as Alouette pet her.

Rock smiled, "She's Blues' kitty, but he said I could take her to play. Isn't she cute?" Rock turned to Ciel then, smiling to her in greeting as well, "Hello, Ciel. I hope it's okay that I brought her along. She's a good kitty, she won't cause any trouble." None of Blues' units were ill-behaved.

"Alouette, I know the kitty is cute and you want to play, but make sure you keep an eye on Balette," the felinthrope elf currently watching the new unit as Alouette pet her.

Balette looked at Minuet for a moment, then to Alouette. "Can I play, too?" she asked, dropping to all fours despite her humanoid shape, and a soft purr rose from her throat as she approached Minuet, her wings fluttering slightly.

Alouette scooted back a bit to allow the two to examine each other, trying to hold back the giggles as Balette tried to still her wings as Minuet batted at them playfully. "I think she likes you, Balette!"

Balette reached one paw up, petting Minuet's chin, and the mechaniloid's head tilted up as Minuet started purring. "I like her, too," the elf said, purring and meowing in return, a line of communication opening between the two.

Ciel smiled, the expression a little less forced this time. "I think your brother's cat just made a new friend."

"I think so," Rock smiled more widely, but then blinked, almost starting as though someone just tapped on his shoulder, although what Elec had just done over their link was a close approximation. Rock moved over to his brother then, looking up to him curiously: what could he help Elec with?

"I've been analyzing the crystals the Cyber Elves use for their cores, but your scanning capabilities are more comprehensive than mine. Mind taking a look?" Elec handed one of the larger crystals to Rock.

"Sure, just give me a minute," Rock said, his pupils visibly focusing like a camera's lens. He was quiet for a little bit, the seconds stretching into a minute, then another, and Elec turned back to his table to continue what he'd been doing while Rock ran his analysis.

After almost five minutes, Rock blinked, his optics refocusing and switching back to normal use, and Rock's brow furrowed for a moment before his eyes widened and he looked up to Ciel, trying to keep his voice even. "Where do these crystals originate?"

"Energen mines," Ciel stated plainly. "As I told Elec earlier, there are currently over two dozen active mines on the Eurasian landmass that are under Neo Arcadian control, and several hundred other mines across the planet that have been abandoned since mining operations were scaled back in recent years. They've been found all over the planet, and at different depths, for almost two hundred years now, possibly even longer if they weren't recognized as Energen Crystals back then. Why?"

"These…" Rock began, then stopped, blinking, the worried expression not leaving his face. "You're calling them Energen Crystals? These…I've _felt_ this kind of power before, although what these crystals have is…is like it's been diluted, watered down to _nothing_. They were found in mines on _Earth_?" And Rock seemed surprised by that. After several moments, Elec's eyes widened, the channels between the Robot Masters on the base suddenly flooded with the rapid exchange of data. "This crystal…its energy signature reminds me of Blues' core, except his core is…these crystals are _stable_." They weren't nearly so volatile. "But…no, I'm not mistaken. It's like taking a drop of color and putting it in a lake, but it's _there_."

"Of course they were found in mines on Earth," Ciel said, curious as to why Rock would think otherwise. Despite the existence of space colonies like the Ragnarok station or the Eurasia Colony that had crashed in the previous century, their reach into space was very limited. "The current theory as to their origin has something to do with a prehistoric asteroid impact, but one that predated even the Chicxulub impact, but it wasn't anything I was able to read too much on since I was raised with a focus on programming rather than crystal research."

"You're sure they're not…that they're stable?" Elec seemed a bit alarmed now.

"Yeah, they're not…they're really weak compared to the potential output his core is capable of. They're not dangerous." Rock nodded, though he still seemed worried about something.

"Dangerous how?" Ciel asked.

Rock hesitated again, "The way his core is set up now, it's not dangerous, but if it was mishandled, it could be," he finally said.

"My core could be dangerous if mishandled," Elec shrugged, putting on a nonchalant face even if, over the network, he was still agitated.

"Oh!" and Ciel shook her head. "I hadn't meant to ask about Blues' core. I was curious as to how the crystals could be considered dangerous, seeing as the only real issue we've ever had with them, aside from burnout, was the fact that Mother Elf's core programming was corrupted, which is what set off the Elf Wars in the first place." And the chances of that happening again had been drastically reduced when protections had been added to Cyber Elf coding to prevent anyone from tampering with the programming data after the elf's crystal had been encoded and activated.

Rock nodded slowly, though he still looked a bit upset somehow. "These crystals aren't dangerous. That's what I was saying. They're completely stable." Blues' core was a lot of things, but stable was not one of them. These, though? They paled in comparison, but at least they were safe.

"Rock," Alouette asked, looking to the Robot Master, "Sis said something earlier about making the elf crystals work better. Do you think there's a way to make them work where they can't ever use their core crystal energy?" If there was one thing that Alouette despised about the elves' nature, it was the fact that they could use their core crystal just as easily as they could use the additional energy they gained from consuming more crystals.

Rock looked to Alouette as he considered her question, "Theoretically, yes. It should be. I'm surprised it's coded to allow them to do that at all, actually." Why were they coded that way to begin with?

"Cyber Elves weren't initially sentient in the same way as Reploids," Ciel explained. "The original elves were created as cures to the Maverick Virus, as offshoots of Mother Elf's programming. When those elves were used as weapons of war, the coding sets were applied to completely new units with additional protections against corruption or code tampering. The problem is, the way they're coded, no one has ever figured out how to get their systems to register the core crystal's energy as any different from the energy that they consume. In all technicalities, they are the same thing."

"Could I have a copy of the base template code for Cyber Elves? I'll give it to Blues once he finishes his other projects. He's…he's better at coding than I am," Rock admitted. Not that there was anything wrong with that: Rock's focus had never been coding.

"Sis, I have a copy," Alouette said, pushing herself to her feet and stepping over the kitty-tangle that was Minuet and Balette. "I can upload it to your computer and Rock can get it from there," unless Rock was okay with linking. But wasn't he a different kind of robot, so did they even link the same way?

"You're on the network, so you can transfer it that way," Rock said helpfully, still looking at the crystal, completely unnerved by it.

"But…you're not on the network, Rock," Alouette explained. "Or I just can't find you." She'd have sent the data that way already had she been able to find him on the comm net.

Rock actually flushed. "Oh! I'm sorry!" After a moment, a link request was issued to Alouette, from Rock, except this time he didn't disguise himself as a Reploid.

The little Reploid's eyes went wide when she established the link. "You feel just like Mister Ice did when he took over the comm net," she noted, selecting the file and sending it over to Rock. "Do all of your brothers feel like that when they link?"

Rock accepted the transfer and nodded, "Yes, we all do. It's…it's the standard for us. To be honest, you feel a bit strange," and Rock smiled a little bit. "It's small like a human account, but you can do a lot more than a human can."

Alouette had just opened her mouth to say something when Balette yowled, dashing across the room in a yellowish blur, hiding under Ciel's computer terminal, paw reaching to brush against her wings. Moving for the elf, Alouette reached down and carefully scooped her up, looking at the wing she'd been nursing. "It's not that bad," the Reploid noted, even though the wing was slightly bent, angled askew from the rest of the wing, though it hadn't broken. "What happened?"

"My own fault," Balette admitted, "I'm still not fully used to having wings and Minuet's paw got stuck on this one."

Setting the elf down on the table, Alouette quickly summoned one of her Nurse Elves from the storage device. "Mappie, Balette's wing is hurt," she said, grabbing a crystal from her pocket and handing it to the elf. "Could you please fix it?"

"Not a problem," Mappie answered, smiling, as she began to tend to the wing. "And one crystal's far too much for this little bit of work. I'll be fine."

Alouette pocketed the crystal and turned to Rock. "The file transfer looks good from here. Can I disconnect?" and there was a hint of discomfort in her voice.

"Sure," Rock said, but he disconnected first, backing up from Alouette. None of the Reploids really seemed to like it when Ice was asserting himself on the network, so he didn't want to push anyone. Even if it was a situation that they'd need to get used to once they moved into Neo Arcadia and his brothers began to actually work. Rock watched the Cyber Elves curiously, noting how Mappie's ability was so much like X's ability when he was healing.

"There!" Mappie said a moment later. "Balette, test it out, please."

Standing, Balette fluttered her wings, taking to the air almost effortlessly, and she smiled. "Thanks, Mappie."

"Glad I could help," and she looked to Alouette. "You might want to let Balette stay out of containment for the rest of the day. If she's only recently gained her wings, she needs a bit of time to get used to them."

"I know," Alouette assured, "and I will," and then loaded Mappie back into the storage device. "If it's alright, Balette, I want you to stay away from Minuet. She's still a little kitty and you have wings to adjust to."

"I'm sorry," Rock said, looking worriedly between Alouette and Balette. Perhaps he should have been minding Minuet more closely.

"No need to fuss over me so much," Balette said with a shrug. "As Mappie said, I'm still getting used to having wings, so I can't quite play around like I used to. And it's not Minuet's fault either. She's simply acting like a cat."

Rock smiled and nodded slightly, even though he was still a little worried. Balette was right, though: Minuet wasn't behaving out of line. The repair had been quick, too. "I can stay for a little bit to help with the crystal analysis," he offered, stepping over to the table beside Elec and choosing another to examine.


	35. In Memoriam de Lapsis

_Back in Neo Arcadia, the remaining children of X are finally released from their testing. Both are grieving and, in effort to do right by their brothers, now carry memorials of the lost AXRs. Hopefully, these simple mementos will give them the strength to continue on. And that says nothing of the emotional toll these recent events have taken on their father…_

_And speaking of the copy unit, he gets a rather unexpected visit today. And if the unit who stops by isn't surprise enough, the offer he brings before Copy X definitely is._

_And we'd like to thank everyone for the continued support we've been receiving. HarunaRei just picked up a second job (yay!) and has been a bit busy to be able to respond to reviews recently, and Midnyght, unfortunately, is still without a functioning laptop. We'll try and get through to answer some people's questions in the coming week._

* * *

><p>Fefnir inhaled deeply as the plugs were pulled from his ports, pushing himself from the pod once he'd been fully disengaged, and he silently grabbed his helmet from the tech that had been holding it. "Everything's clean?" he asked; he'd been undergoing intensive virus scans for the past four days and wanted to know the results as soon as possible.<p>

"We've run every test we could think of, Guardian Fefnir. Everything came back clean," the Reploid answered. "And from what we're seeing in the coding, you and Guardian Leviathan should, by all accounts, be immune. There's protections in your base programming to counter infection and protect you from any influx of Maverick energy."

Leviathan had awakened several minutes before Fefnir and already received her prognosis: she, too, was completely clean. She was looking down to the floor, lost in thought, but she did look up when Fefnir emerged, listening as the technician told her brother the same thing that she'd been told: they were immune.

They were immune, but Phantom went Maverick.

And this Maverick, their once-brother, killed Harpuia. He was likely going to strike again and, suddenly, Leviathan realized that she was the eldest now. It left a sick, empty feeling inside her.

Fefnir looked over to his sister, noticing the almost-hollow look in her eyes, and he moved over to her, silently wrapping his arms around her. There were a million things that he wanted to say, so much he wanted to offer her in terms of comfort, and couldn't even bring himself to speak a single syllable. He pulled her closer, letting the simple motion speak for him.

She leaned into his embrace, sliding off of the table she'd been sitting on, her ranseur leaned against the nearby wall. "We're both clean," she said, her voice coming out a bit softer than usual. She slid her arms around Fefnir: even if he wasn't as vocal about his feelings, even if he wasn't displaying it, she knew he had to be grieving, too. Their numbers had been halved. "I've been ordered back onto patrol."

_That_ got him speaking again. "What? After all this? Levi, you can't! If…If Phantom's still…he'll come after you, us…Levi, you have to stay in the city." He held her tighter, as if that would be enough to get her to listen to him.

She shook her head, even as Fefnir protested. "Father ordered it. The city has to be protected," and they'd all made a vow, hadn't they?

"Father…" and he stopped for a moment, as if considering his words, "Father's not in his right mind, Levi. You saw how he took the news. He's…I'm almost tempted to say that he's taking this worse than we are. Just…you saw him, _heard_ him, when he gave us the news. Even the way he let us find out," and he frowned at the thought. "Father's not thinking straight, Levi. We've lost two already and he's…I don't know how any of us are coping. I honestly don't." And to Fefnir, that unease, that sense of being lost in his emotions, rocked him to the core. He was a fighting unit, the strongest of Neo Arcadia's forces, and yet this? This was near to breaking him down more completely than any physical damage he'd ever been dealt in all the years they'd been fighting the Maverick scourge.

"He didn't react at all," to the death. It was as though a faceless soldier died and they had to reposition to pick up the slack. Like it wasn't one of his sons that was killed. Her father just lost two sons and he didn't even look affected. It made her wonder what it was like once those doors were closed and X was alone. "I…don't think he took it well," she finally said. "Stay close to him, Fefnir." And that was a plea: she couldn't stay close, couldn't watch either of them when she had her job to do. When her job took her outside Neo Arcadia.

A Reploid darted into the room then, worry crossing her features as she moved closer to the two Guardians. "My apologies, Guardian Leviathan. I retrieved these as soon as I could. Forgive me for the delay in delivering these to you," and she handed Leviathan an unmarked box, similar in design to the one that she'd been given by X days before.

"Leviathan, what…?" Fefnir asked, finally releasing his sister, her request to him noted but dismissed for the moment. He wanted to know what was in the box that the Reploid who had delivered it seemed so distressed for the time it had taken.

She accepted the box from the Reploid, taking it carefully as she nodded to the unit. "Thank you. Dismissed." Right now, she didn't even care about the delay. What was important was that it was _here_. Carefully, she set the box down on the table and opened it, pulling two items out. They were Harpuia's sabers. "They're damaged beyond repair, but I had the casings replaced," so they wouldn't have to look at what Phantom's kunai had done. She pulled a third item from the box, a sheath for the blade's hilt, and handed it to Fefnir along with one of the sabers. Her gaze was pained, but steady. Determined. They _would_ do right by their older brother, come hell or high water.

"Levi, I don't…I don't…why?" he asked, even as he took the offered items from her. "They…they won't activate, so…" He couldn't understand the idea of carrying around useless weapons, even considering who had wielded the sabers before they'd been wrecked. "Why would you want me to carry this? Even if they did work, I'm not skilled in saber use."

She sighed and managed a weak smile, cuffing him lightly on the side of his helmet like she did when they were kids and he wasn't getting it. "It's a memorial, Fefnir. To honor his memory." She'd heard a human say once that funerals were for the living. She thought that now, after this, she better understood what they meant.

Acceptance was the final stage of grief, after all.

Fefnir looked at the items in his hands, nodding solemnly to Leviathan as he reached down to attach the sheath to his right leg, securing it before dropping the saber into place with a quiet click. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to offend you. I just…" _I don't want to be reminded of this every day,_ "I'm not…" and he hugged her as soon as she'd secured her saber. "I miss him, too. Miss them _both_," he said, and his voice was breaking ever so slightly.

"We…we have to remember, when we see him again…we have to remember that it's not him. We have to remember that he's _already dead_." That whatever was puppeteering Phantom's body, it wasn't him. Not anymore. She was trembling as she said it, her shoulders shaking not with fear, but with grief and pain. Harpuia hadn't deserved what Phantom did to him. Phantom didn't deserve what happened to him. She hoped that the sabers would be enough to anchor them.

"I'll stay as close as I can to Father," Fefnir said, refusing to let her go. "Whatever you do…while you're on patrol, I want hourly reports. Let me know what's going on. Let me know you're safe. Until you come back to the city, Levi, I want to know you're alright."

"I'll check in with you hourly," Leviathan agreed, and it was a promise. She knew how dangerous this was to her, how dangerous the seas would be now with their brother apparently hunting his siblings down. "Let me know if anything changes in the city, let me know immediately if something happens and I need to return. Let's keep the communication line active."

Fefnir remained silent, quietly contemplating Leviathan's words and the memorial they would carry of their eldest brother. "Levi, where are Phantom's kunai?"

She paused at that, "They're still downstairs, in the labs, I think."

"Send a message down to the labs. I want them brought up here."

Leviathan nodded, closing her eyes for a moment as she focused through the channels, quickly posting the Reploid in charge of that lab with the orders. At least, she thought, there hadn't been an order issued to dispose of the kunai. Fefnir was right to ask for them: both brothers were to be counted among the fallen now.

"From what you said about Father putting you back on patrol duty, you have your routes already figured out." And with Harpuia and Phantom's lieutenants already reassigned to either of the remaining Guardians? "Do you want me to send any of the Jin'en with you? I know Tech Kraken was reassigned to your fleet, but…" He hated that there really wasn't a way for him to stay at her side, to protect her, even if she was the elder between them. She was still his sister, and Harpuia's death was obviously taking its toll on her mental health. "I don't want you to go."

She smiled a bit weakly, "I'll be fine, Fef. I have three of…three former Zan'ei lieutenants and Aztec Falcon for additional support should anything come up. That's quite a guard; I don't think we need to move any other units from Neo Arcadia," especially not when Leviathan herself was far from helpless.

"We don't," he said, his voice low. "I just wish that there was something more I could do. You and Father are all that I have left, and to stay here, to guard one while the other is forced to leave the city?" He shook his head. "I don't want to lose anyone else. This is already too much," already cut too deep.

"I think that Father has taken this far worse than either of us," she said, gaze dropping down and to the side: why else would he seem so cut off, if not grief? "He _needs_ you here, whether he'll say it or not." Needed the support and protection far more than Leviathan.

"And that's why I'm staying, like you asked. Anubis Necromancess and the Anchus brothers can handle the patrols outside of the city, and Magnion and Flauclaws can take care of whatever's going on here." Anyone that had the gall to make an attempt on their father's life would have to deal with Zan'ei assassins _and_ a very pissed off Fefnir. "If…if Phantom…if you encounter that Maverick while…" Fefnir forced an agitated breath through his nose. "Stay safe, Levi," he said finally, resting their foreheads together.

A Reploid stepped into the room a moment later, holding Phantom's kunai already secured in their own sheaths, handing the items to Leviathan. "Guardian Leviathan, Guardian Fefnir…we…our sincerest condolences for your loss," he said, bowing to her. He knew he risked a great deal in allowing himself the use of his emotional matrix, but for this? For the Guardians who had lost such close family? He'd let himself be marked Maverick before he'd deny them knowledge that the city supported them, cared for them despite the emotional locks that were required.

She didn't thank the unit verbally, but her gaze did soften as she took the kunai from him, a small smile finding its way to her face as she nodded to him. She was thankful, even if she couldn't acknowledge it right now. _This_, she thought, _has to go_. This repression. There had to be a way to reason with Father, but now was not the time, not when they were all in so much grief. "Dismissed," she told the Reploid even as she handed one of the kunai to Fefnir. At least the kunai were still viable weapons, unlike the sabers.

Fefnir secured the sheath to his other leg, running his fingers over the cool metal for a moment. "This…" he said, his voice barely above a whisper, "this _scares_ me," the thought that they had a Maverick sibling, that one of them was somehow _not_ immune, that one of them fell and was trying to take the rest of his family with him in his madness.

"I know," Leviathan said, just as quietly. "Feeling this now, and knowing…Fef, how many _decades_ did Father exist this way, with one ally after another, one friend after another falling, over and over," with no end in sight, not until the Mother Elf? But then? And now, it was starting again?

"And now he's lost half his family," Fefnir admitted. "I'll stay at his side, Levi, as long as he allows me." He hugged her once more before stepping back and bowing. Mentally, he linked into the network and set up permissions for a permanent network link between him and Leviathan. "Every hour on the hour," he said solemnly.

She bowed as well, smiling to Fefnir once again, "On the hour." She permitted Fefnir's link, setting it up from her end as well so that even if something did happen to her, he'd know immediately. There wouldn't need to be a third party to deliver any news.

* * *

><p>A knock startled Copy X from his thoughts, turning from the data scrolling across his terminal screen to stare, somewhat confusedly, at the door to his quarters. He'd had no message or alerts that he was to have visitors, and most that came before him did so in more public forums. Pushing to his feet, he linked with one of the Zan'ei at his door. '<em>Was there a reason you disrupted my work?<em>' he asked, voice seething across the link.

'_You have a visitor, Master X, a scientist by the looks of it,_' the unit responded.

'_Send him in,_' Copy X ordered, crossing his arms over his chest as the door slid open.

A tall male Reploid walked in, long tail of blond hair braided down his back, the white lab coat he wore somewhat worn and dusty. Standing almost a full head taller than Copy X, the unit did not bow once the door closed, striking cerulean eyes simply watching the copy closely.

"Some audacity you have coming before me and then refusing to show proper respect," Copy X said, holding his ground. "What is your serial?"

"Instead of my number," the blond answered, eyes piercing as they locked with Copy X's own, "I'd rather provide my name. I am Telesphoros," and only then did he bow.

"Audacious and bold in a city where personality and identities for our kind are so heavily restricted. Care to let me in on how you're important enough to warrant the allowance of a name?"

Telesphoros smirked. "Now is that any way to greet the assistant of your creator, _Copy X_?"

The Reploid's eyes went wide, and he bowed deeply. "My apologies, Telesphoros. I did not recognize you."

"It's alright," he said, moving to take a seat and motioning for Copy X to do the same. "I did not spend much time in the lab during your construction. Was really only there for a short while to drop of some of the supplies your creator required, since my services are oft put to other uses. You probably wouldn't remember me," and there was a hint of a smile on the Reploid's face at that.

"What brings you to Neo Arcadia Tower?" Copy X said as he dropped into his chair. "I haven't heard from my creator since a few days after my activation, so for you to come unannounced…"

"It does seem odd, but things have been becoming more and more problematic. Your creator and I have been working on a few projects over the past few years, and one of the more recent developments may be of use for the power plant." Telesphoros leaned back in his chair, his expression becoming a bit more somber. "And we have heard about the loss of two of your Guardians. Such a shame and a pity that one so important could have fallen to the virus and taken the life of another in his bloodlust."

"Despite what the remaining two say and their emotional attachments being what they are, it's more of a strategic loss than anything else, one that can be made up for, given time." Copy X dismissed the unit's solemnity. "Do not waste your breath on condolences I don't care to accept."

"The Jin'en and Meikai Generals have been returned to active duty?"

Copy X nodded. "Fefnir will likely express worry for Leviathan to be placed on duty outside of the city perimeter, but I think us hiding her like that would only goad whatever is left of Phantom into attacking the city again."

Telesphoros nodded. "And they underwent testing for the virus?"

"For the last four days, yes, and I just received word that they've completed their testing," Copy X returned. "And I underwent my own testing in secret. I was never told if I carried the original X's immunity, so I thought it prudent."

"The results are good, I would assume?"

Another nod. "All three sets came back completely clean."

"That is good," and the blond looked over Copy X for a moment longer, "though you were made to be immune, so further worries of that sort should not cross your mind."

"I was?" Copy X looked astounded. "How so? I was under the impression that X had been immune because of his age."

"It was part of a process similar in fashion to what had been done to the Guardians," Telesphoros offered.

"It obviously failed with Phantom, so what's to keep that from happening to me?"

The blond laughed a bit. "It is said that X coded the Guardians himself, so there was obviously something wrong with his methods. You, however? Your creator is highly skilled in designing Reploid systems, so even though he and X used the same base idea, your version would not contain the same glitches that allowed Phantom to become infected."

Copy X remained quiet for a while, letting the information bounce around his processor. "You mentioned the power plant earlier?"

"Ah, yes," Telesphoros said, sitting up, threading his fingers together in his lap as he sat forward. "It seems that even the best attempts at correcting the flux issues and the overall output decline aren't doing much, so we have been looking into alternative means of correcting the issue. This city being the last bastion for the two races, it was important to figure out how."

"And were you able to come up with anything substantial?"

"We believe so, but I'd need to see the facility myself. Working in Reploid engineering only goes so far in terms of clearance, so getting into the power plant is currently beyond my level of authority. It's part of the reason I was told to speak with you."

"To ask me for access?" Copy X said, tilting his head. "I don't see why not. The Judges grow more divisive a council each day with the retirement orders, so something to stem the tide there will help greatly."

"Thank you," Telesphoros said as he stood, bowing once more. "If you'd like, I can provide my net access information so that you can forward the clearance orders to the necessary individuals."

Copy X got to his feet, bowing in return. "I am beyond grateful for this news, and let my builder know that if he is ever in need of anything, he need but ask or send you to make the request, and I will do what I can to assist."

The taller unit smiled, though there was a hint of something sinister in the expression. "Thank you very much for your generosity, Master X. We will both be greatly indebted to you for your assistance."

"If your work can save the plant and the city," Copy X assured, resting one hand on the Reploid's shoulder, "it will be I who is indebted to you."

"Take care and good night," Telesphoros said as he turned and left the room.

Copy X stood staring at the door for a long moment, wondering for a moment why the scientist, despite all his words, had seemed so incredibly familiar, as if he had met him some other time and his memory banks simply refused to supply the when.


	36. Bittersweet Reunion

_Perhaps playing at being Maverick isn't the smartest of choices to make, but that certainly doesn't stop Harpuia and Phantom from running with this horrible little joke. Things are a little different this time, though, as the brothers decide that something special is needed for their sister's capture. She is, after all, not a fan of their pranks, especially not with the recent upset to her life and the loss of her eldest and baby brothers._

_It is rather un-Maverick-like to apologize, isn't it?_

_Also, we have wonderful news. Midnyght finally got a replacement computer and there is so much writing happening. _

_Five months without reasonable internet access is just brutal._

* * *

><p>"Father?" Harpuia said, looking to his father, the Cyber Elf looking as if he was meditating, eyes closed as he hovered a bit above the bed.<p>

"Yes, Harpy?" X said, wondering why his eldest sounded so nervous.

Harpuia looked to his father, remaining silent for a moment before looking to Phantom.

The Guardian nodded. "We need you to send a message to Shadow-sensei. We're going to get Leviathan."

X looked between his sons for a moment before nodding. Reaching across the link, '_Shadow, my sons say that they're ready to grab their sister. Were you informed of this?_'

'_I was. They're ready to leave immediately?_' Shadow finished his _other _assignment, the one regarding Rock's need of reskinning, quickly. There was now a new box under Blues' bed and while Shadow understood that X pled with Blues to do it in the lab like a normal unit, he half-expected the eldest Robot Master to wait until X had retired for the night, then do the procedure in the bedroom.

Most of the Robot Masters already knew better than to argue against Blues' quirks.

'_They are. Where would you like to meet them, or will you be coming to the room to gather them?_' X was a little curious as to what the two had planned, though he didn't bother asking. He was fairly certain it wasn't anything he had to worry about.

Shadow answered X's question by materializing from a corner of the room, one eye closed as always as he looked the two Guardians over. "Are you ready to leave immediately?"

Both units stood immediately, bowing. "We are, Shadow-sensei," Phantom said. "We won't be long, Father."

"We'll be back with Levi before you know it," Harpuia said to X, looking over his shoulder as Shadow pulled him and Phantom into the shadows.

X facepalmed the minute he'd seen Harpuia's eyes, even as his sons disappeared into the darkness.

This running gag about actually being Maverick was going to get the two of them handed their asses if his daughter still responded to their pranks now as she had all those years ago.

* * *

><p>"Shadow-sensei, we need to make a second stop in the city. There's something Harpuia reminded me that we need to get before we go after our sister."<p>

Shadow glanced back at them. This was Harpuia's first time in this space while conscious, but he wasn't as disoriented as Shadow may have expected. He hadn't missed that the two Reploids were sticking very, very close to him and even closer to one another. "What do you need?"

Harpuia was a bit hard-pressed to keep up with both of the ninjas, Phantom's warning to switch his optics to their night-vision capabilities having been one of the only things that allowed him to keep himself oriented after being pulled through the shadows. His flight capabilities, of course, were what allowed him to keep pace with the two, coasting along through the broad expanse of empty blackness. "We need to get a mockup of our sister's ranseur from one of the factories, as we mentioned, but considering the way she'll likely respond to our maneuver, we're going to need to pick up a few chocolates as part of our apology."

Phantom smirked, though the glint in his crimson eyes wasn't able to be caught in the darkness that enshrouded them. "Make sure you get regular chocolates and the caramel-filled ones. She's going to be _livid_ about this."

"I don't know who she's going to be more pissed at," Harpuia admitted, dropping a bit and moving closer to his brother.

Shadow was adjusting his speed so that the two Reploids would be able to keep up with him. Harpuia was holding his own just fine, though, so the three of them could focus on moving at an acceptable rate. "Chocolates?" He sounded amused by that. "Are you certain it's wise to antagonize her this way?"

"Probably not," Harpuia admitted with a bit of a chuckle. "Doesn't mean that we're not going to."

"She's _eventually_ going to get used to the idea that we like pulling the occasional prank on her, serious as she tries to be about things," Phantom said, his own voice full of mirth. "Although, the more I think about it, Shadow-sensei, would it be alright to leave her ranseur in this dimension for the first few days? Her plus her main weapon may end up a little bit messier than Father might like."

"I could do that," Shadow told them, though he didn't know how much that's actually protect them: didn't these units know hand-to-hand combat? Rock was plenty dangerous even with his buster cannon disabled, and that said nothing of Blues' skill.

Most Robot Masters could generate new weapons, like he with his Shadow Blades, so perhaps it wasn't as much of an issue to him.

A thought occurred to Phantom and he looked over to Harpuia. "When we get within range of the transmission towers, I want you to stay off the net. Shadow-sensei and I can cloak effectively, but the Zan'ei would be able to tell you logged on without a hitch." He opened a local wireless link with his brother. '_Besides, we can communicate effectively enough like this that you won't need to be on the networks anyway._'

'_I'll keep that in mind,_' Harpuia shot back. '_Any chance you'll ever teach me how to fully cloak like you do?_'

'_What, and give up one of my awesome ninja secrets to you? Not a chance, Harpy._'

"We'll be on the city's outskirts in about fifteen minutes," Shadow said, not remotely tired out despite the long trek. It was nice to not be human. "Which district do you want to hit first?"

"Let's get the mechaniloids started on the ranseur, but hit the commercial district first. It's late enough that the stores should be closed, so grabbing the chocolates shouldn't present too much of an issue. We can grab the weaponry and get out soon after, although I'm going to have to hack into the databases, see where the city posted Levi, while we're there."

"How long do you think that will take?" Harpuia asked.

Phantom shrugged, "Maybe about four or five minutes just to make sure I don't set off any of the security alerts, even if the system should still be open to my signal."

"Because Copy X never bothered to block your signal?" At that, Harpuia frowned. "Now that you're likely marked as truly Maverick to the city, wouldn't your access be blocked?"

"That's like saying that locking my door meant that I couldn't leave the room," Phantom retorted.

Harpuia laughed a bit at that. "Father was rather annoyed when he found out you'd snuck out after being grounded."

Shadow had a feeling that Phantom was going to be using this opportunity to show Shadow how much he'd grown since their last raid. It was good that Phantom was such a conscientious student. "I can issue the orders to have the ranseur built without needing to visit the manufacturing district first, so pick your chocolatier and we'll be on our way."

Shadow knew enough of females to realize that drug store chocolates wouldn't do. No, they'd be doing this the right way, and that meant getting the good stuff.

"I'll send you a highlighted map for the city once we're on the networks," and Phantom really wondered if there was a way to set up a local wireless link with the Robot Masters when there wasn't an available network. Actually…

"Shadow-sensei, I realize I should have asked this earlier, but I've been kind of stuck on the link that you and the other Robot Masters have with my father. Do you have local wireless capabilities?"

"We have a number of ways to establish connections, but yes, we do have a local wireless capability." The tech wasn't the same kind the Reploids used. "Proto Man gave a program to X that permits him to link to us in his current form, but he and Zero both were built with us, the Robot Masters, in mind. They have included capabilities, or would have had they had their original bodies."

"So that's a no for now," Phantom noted. "Well, that's not a problem. We'll be on the net shortly and it won't take long to position ourselves and get everything together."

A short while later, Phantom and Shadow were logged on the city net, Phantom waiting for Shadow to reach for him and establish the communications link.

Shadow established the link and partitioned the network in one swoop, the Robot Master moving about like he _belonged_ there, the system acknowledging him as the highest kind of authority, someone whose movements needn't be reported to those below him. It wasn't their business, wasn't their place to question this user's decisions. Just like they needn't know about the new order put in through the manufacturing district.

Shadow always thought that the civilians wouldn't want to know, anyway. It was like the stagehands in a play: the audience didn't _want_ to see the set being changed for the next act. They just wanted to see the next scene. What went on behind wasn't something they needed to know or understand, wasn't something they wanted to see. They always just wanted the results, never the process. Perhaps that's why they were so helpless when left to fend for themselves.

The moment the link went active, Phantom sent the map over, marking the store they were going to grab the chocolates from, as well as verifying on the net that the store was indeed closed for the night. Last thing he wanted was to get caught by the store manager doing the final credit count for the night or locking up.

Quite unlike a Maverick to be concerned with something as trivial as chocolate, after all. It wouldn't do his perceived reputation any justice.

Even if the chocolates _were_ rather delicious.

Once the transfer had completed (not that it had taken long), Phantom was diving into the military section of the net, looking for any sign of where Leviathan was currently posted so that he could get coordinates and…

"Oh, _crap_," he muttered aloud, thankful that they were still safely tucked away in Shadow's hidey-hole dimension.

'_What's wrong?_' Harpuia sent over their link immediately.

Phantom sent the message along both lines of communication. '_Leviathan and Fefnir are full-linked,_' he said, '_and Fef's been keeping a _ridiculously_ close eye on her if…_' And his eyes widened further. '_Oh, this is going to be _fun_,_' and that last word was said with equal parts apprehension and excitement.

'_What?_' Harpuia was _not_ used to being out of the loop regarding anything, especially linked as he had been to the comm net, even if passively, during his time in the city.

'_They bought it. They think I killed you,_' and Phantom smirked a bit. '_I think it'd be in our best interests to double up on the chocolate order, though, just for some added insurance._' Which meant eight boxes of chocolate instead of the originally-intended four.

'_Your brother will know the instant she becomes distressed, then._' That she was posted so far out from the city was beneficial, then: he wouldn't be able to reach her in time. Shadow was leading them to the chocolatier now, heading downward in the dimension as the floor beneath their feet suddenly began descending, as though in response to the Robot Master's whims.

'_Where is Fefnir now anyway?_' Harpuia asked.

The Reploid had linked Harpuia's local wireless into his feed with Shadow to ensure that the older ninja was kept informed of all communications without having to repeat the message, and he sent back, '_He's with Copy X, from what I'm hearing,_' and there was a coldness in his voice, a repressed anger at something he'd heard. '_Harpuia, I'm going to need you to get into the chocolatier's. I've got to do a little reorganization with the units, try to get Aztec off of Leviathan's patrol route._'

'_They reassigned my lieutenants?_' That was a shock, especially with his 'death' having happened so recently.

'_They reassigned mine as well. Kraken, Ourobockle, and Hekelot have all been shifted to the Meikai._' He was going to have to get pretty creative with patrol orders to clear them out of the Pacific waters Leviathan was in at the moment. Another map was transferred to Shadow, this time of the Pacific Ocean, a small yellow line marking off the borders of Leviathan's patrol area. Well, no time like the present…

"They're keeping very close to her," Shadow noted: the units were behaving more like a guard, more like an escort, than like subordinate units on patrol. That was likely encouraged by Fefnir, Shadow thought, although for all he knew, Leviathan could have ordered it herself, or the lieutenants were doing it on their own.

Ah, but now, Phantom's orders were beginning to take effect: false reports of supposed 'Maverick' activity, altered routes, official orders. The lieutenants would be stripped from her side, one by one, until she was quite isolated, alone in the Pacific. Phantom also hacked into the nearest Trans Server, ensuring it would glitch and refuse incoming teleports: there would be no swift aid. Of course, if everything went as Shadow intended, that precaution wouldn't be necessary. She'd be gone before they knew it.

Harpuia had to be guided out of the shadow space, cutting his boosters off long before Shadow had provided him with a way out of the dimension. "Aren't there cameras?" he asked Shadow quietly, even as he dared to peek out through a shadow cast in a far corner.

"All disabled," Shadow reassured him, standing just behind Harpuia, his red-eyed gaze falling out, into the little shop. Well, not so much disabled as being fed with a feed of the shop with no one in there. There would be a time lapse, of course, but no one would see any intruder over the security cameras.

Harpuia still ducked as he entered the shop, careful to keep his motions quiet and steady, not wanting to draw any attention through the glass windows at the front of the store, even with the street mostly abandoned save for the occasional passerby. Reaching for one of the display cases, he cursed a little beneath his breath, finding the unit locked.

That, at least, Phantom had taught him to deal with, and the lock was released, the Guardian careful not to trip any possible alarm codes beneath the main lock code. Looking through the collected boxes for a moment, he withdrew four boxes, then another four, before tilting his head. He considered the choice for a moment, shrugged, and grabbed another set of four.

It only took a moment longer to get the candies into a small bag and the lock reengaged on the case. Harpuia frowned a bit at the thought that a commodity such as chocolate had to be locked up like this at night.

Then again, it wasn't as if credits were as easy to steal as candy. The currency of the city was just as digital as the rest of their exchanges.

'_I got what you suggested, and then some,_' Harpuia said, looking to Phantom.

Phantom held up one finger, relaxing after a moment. '_If it weren't for the fact that Fefnir would panic, I'd be putting a communications block between them, but they'd notice it regardless of how cloaked I am. So, what extra did you get?_'

'_They had raspberry cordial,_' Harpuia replied.

Phantom smirked a bit at that. At least Leviathan would be decently distracted by the sweets, even if they wouldn't serve as a permanent blockade between her anger and them.

Shadow was only half paying attention to the two Guardians, closing the entrance off once Harpuia reentered, his head tilted as he monitored that factory in the manufacturing district. "The mechaniloid units report that the ranseur will be ready in three minutes," which meant that they were right on schedule.

"Then we should get moving," Phantom said, Harpuia taking to the air with a soft thrum.

It took fewer than three minutes to get to the manufacturing district. Shadow stepped out to accept the weapon replica from the mechaniloid units, assuring them that they did well before disappearing back into the darkness. The Pacific Ocean was a wide expanse, but given that they had Leviathan's patrol route and that either of her brothers would be quite provocative bait, Shadow wasn't worried about locating her. She'd come to them, they just had to get in range.

Harpuia had been given the map of Leviathan's patrol route when Shadow had stepped out to grab the ranseur, the wing crests of his helmet dipping a bit as he took the weapon from the Robot Master.

"You still okay with this?" Phantom said: they'd been planning this for the past week, but if Harpuia wanted to back out now, he'd accept that without complaint.

"It's not that," Harpuia said, looking to his brother, the map passed back along their link. "The area I highlighted, there's a very small bit of land there. It's probably a little further north of where she's at, but I know how to get her attention," had known since they'd started planning this little trip.

"What's wrong?" Phantom asked. There was _something_ bothering the eldest AXR.

"We're going to have to siege Neo Arcadia with Fefnir poised on the wrong side of the battle," Harpuia admitted. "He's not going to be happy at all about us taking Levi, especially if he thinks that we killed her," and his grip tightened on the weapon he carried, the bag of chocolates dangling from his right wrist.

"Let Father show up within his visual range and Fef will switch sides faster than I did." Phantom smiled as he rested his hands on his brother's shoulders, "Now, let's go get our sister and hope we got enough chocolates to convince her not kill us." He turned to Shadow then. "Shadow-sensei, we're ready."

As if to emphasize his brother's point, Harpuia handed the chocolates off to Phantom, taking to the air once more.

It turned out that Neo Arcadia was relatively close to the ocean when you were moving through shadowspace. It only took an hour or so to get far enough out to be in Leviathan's patrol pathway, although without actually going out there and looking around, it would be difficult to locate her. The lieutenants were far from her now, too far to respond quickly enough, and the Trans Server was unusable. She was completely vulnerable, completely without backup. All they required was that she take the bait.

Harpuia handed the ranseur off to Phantom before stepping out of the shadows in a small grove of trees. Still under orders from Phantom to stay off the net, the Guardian hoped that he'd been right in his guess about getting Leviathan's attention.

Even if it involved him going swimming.

Sort of.

With a resigned sigh, the unit took to the air, quickly losing himself to the exhilaration of unfettered freedom granted in open skies. After a few moments of idly floating along the thermals and wind currents, Harpuia tucked his limbs close to his body, gunning his thrusters and aiming for the water below.

He leveled out only inches above the water, hands dancing over the cool water, before he dove beneath for a second with a loud splash, pushing himself back above the water and back into the air soon after.

He only hoped that his antics would draw his sister's attention.

In the ocean, waves were normal. There was no such thing as still waters. The wind blew on the surface, creating currents, and deeper down, with changing pressure…well, everything was in constant flux, everything affected by the ebb and flow of the tides. The moon, the weather, it all affected the world's oceans. What wasn't normal was, well, _splashing_. A little bit, yes: a whale breaching, for example. But the kind her mechaniloid scouts were reporting? No, that wasn't normal at all. Almost lazily, she changed direction in the water, even as trepidation filled her. No, she didn't want anything abnormal to be happening. Abnormal was the last thing she wanted, but she didn't post the change to Fefnir quite yet. She wanted to move in a little closer, get a little bit more data, before sending him into a paranoid tizzy.

With how he'd been, an errant gull might be enough cause for him to come out here himself, even if he was supposed to be guarding Father.

Breezing through the air fast enough to dry himself (at least most of the way), Harpuia was thankful that he'd seen a few smaller mechaniloids darting around the waters where he'd been making such a ruckus for the past quarter of an hour. That meant Leviathan would be notified—or already had been—and that meant he was no longer required to be _diving_. Now all he needed to do was keep flying around the area and wait for Leviathan to notice him.

That, of course, meant a _lot_ of aerial acrobatics, and Harpuia couldn't help but laugh as he snapped a hard banking turn and darted through the sky. It'd been _years_ since he'd last been able to fly this free, what with the Maverick scourge and his military assignment taking up so much of his time.

Especially considering his last four years had been spent in blind servitude to a twisted mimicry of his father.

It took her nearly ten minutes to actually get out to the location—why weren't there any other patrols in the area?-but she didn't surface. She stayed well below, well out of sight, and scanned. What her scan returned sent a cold feeling through her, like she'd been punched in the gut. Slowly, she rose: her vision was attuned for underwater patrolling and combat: it was a setting she had that her siblings did not, and so she did not need to fully surface to have visual confirmation on just what was causing the ruckus.

_Harpuia_. That was _Harpuia_ up there. She was incredibly relieved, but just for a moment. That cold feeling settled back down when she realized what this would have to _mean_. Had Harpuia survived the attack with his mind intact, he'd have come straight home. He hadn't. He was out here. Her hand touched the saber sheathed to her side. _He was out here_.

_What happened._ Phantom's kunai, through his sabers. _What was he doing_. Just flying around, disturbing the surface to gain her attention? Leviathan had the advantage out here; Harpuia had to know that he was a sitting duck in the water. Even as children, he'd hated swimming, would never go with her.

The same way flying frightened her.

Slowly, Leviathan rose, finally breaking the surface, bobbing along with the choppy waves, blue eyes gazing upward, at the sky, her gaze finding and trailing Harpuia. A sick feeling coiled inside her because this _was not right_. Something was terribly off and even though she was at an optimal temperature, she trembled.

Harpuia had felt the scan the moment Leviathan had initiated it, smirking to himself even as he bit down the urge to set up a local wireless link with her. Instead, he sent to Phantom, '_She's scanned, so she knows I'm here._'

'_Try to lead her toward the island,_' Phantom responded. '_We'll be waiting._'

Harpuia moved a little closer to the water, still keeping a safe distance, still staying out of range of her weapons. Letting himself dance through the air, he started off towards a small island in the distance, darting around every now and again, as if ensuring that Leviathan was following, even if he made no overstated motions that _that_ was what he was doing.

She could keep up with an airborne Harpuia so long as she was in the water. _That_ had never been an issue. He darted around like a dragonfly in the summer, zipping back and forth, but didn't make any real attempt to lose her. She didn't mirror his darting around, instead moving in a more-or-less straight line, occasionally flipping over onto her back to reconfirm visuals.

Phantom felt the tremor in the link just before Fefnir established contact, and he linked to Harpuia immediately. '_Harpy, Fef's making contact. We may need to move just a bit faster, even with the Trans Server down._'

'_I'll see what I can do, but if I break off my flight pattern now, she's going to know,_' he returned, still angling his wild darting a little more carefully, drawing him closer to land just a bit faster than he'd been going.

'_Levi,_' Fefnir's voice sounded through their link, and it was tinged with worry, '_you didn't report in. Is everything okay?_' Even it had just been a minute past, she'd kept to the schedule for the rest of the time, so what was the holdup now?

Leviathan's eyes widened and she actually slowed her pursuit: she'd missed the update. She should have posted to Fefnir about this _immediately_. '_Fefnir…_' she responded, and her voice was sick with grief and confusion, '_Harpuia's out here. I…Fefnir, he's _alive.' Alive and whole, but what was he doing out here? Her body began trembling again and she had to force herself to move a bit faster. Harpuia was getting too far ahead.

'_Harpuia's_ what?' That he was shocked was beyond an understatement. '_Levi, are you sure?_'

'_Of course I'm sure,_' and she almost snapped there. She'd know Harpuia even if she were blindfolded in a dark room. '_I haven't tried to link with him,_' she wasn't _that_ stupid, '_but I am in pursuit. He's just…darting around, out of reach._' At the lowest, he was _just_ out of reach of her weapons. '_He knows I'm here._'

'_That sounds like a trap,_' Fefnir warned, '_if he's staying out of reach like that, you need to be careful._' He looked over his shoulder where X was, the unit idly running a hand over his holo-screen, looking somewhat distant, as if the reports displayed weren't even really being read. Looked over, yes, committed to visual memory databanks, but his attention? '_I can't leave Father's side right now, not without informing him of this,_' and he sounded torn by that admission. '_Where are the lieutenants? You're not alone, are you?_' and a message was sent out to the four units that should have been near his sister.

Phantom was quick to piggyback onto all four signals, blocking the communication even as he responded along Hyleg's signal, dangerous though it was to do so to another of the Zan'ei, '_I'm on my way back now, Guardian Fefnir. I've taken care of the Maverick unit and apologize for separating from Guardian Leviathan._'

'_ETA?_' Fefnir requested.

'_Seven minutes, sir._'

Fefnir nodded slightly. '_Good,_' he said. '_The others should be returning in short order as well. Levi…_' and the communications had been limited back to his link with her, '_stay safe. If…If he's out there after what happened with Phantom, he's…he's likely…_' The Guardian couldn't bring himself to say it, hand drifting to the saber held fast against his leg. '_Levi, if it looks like things are…if it gets bad, run. Don't fight him. I know we have our orders, but please,_' he didn't want her to fight, even if the lack of his sabers meant that his electrical attacks weren't available to him. '_Don't try to take him on until backup arrives._'

And Phantom jumped signals, piggybacked off another. '_Guardian Fefnir, I am on my way back to Guardian Leviathan,_' he said with the voice of Azure Falcon. '_My ETA is nine minutes._'

'_Good. The more of you, the better._' Though he remained silent about why he wanted them back, leaving them to think it was simply the matter of his assignment that they stay near Leviathan without being too overbearing.

'_I know, Fef. I know that he's…that he's probably fallen the same way as Phantom,_' and Leviathan's voice shook there: she wasn't dealing well with any of this. Not with Phantom's infection, and certainly not with Harpuia's death. Now, to think that this unit was just that twisted program using her older brother's body as a macabre puppet? This, she realized, was something Father had to contend with over and over again, over the course of decades. Centuries. She didn't want him to know, not until this was over and done with. '_Stay with Father,_' Levi told Fefnir. '_He'll need you near him._'

'_Be safe,_' Fefnir said across the link, hating just how torn he was between all that was left of his family.

Phantom was careful to remain in shadowspace, linked though he was to Harpuia, to avoid any of Leviathan's scans. '_How close are you and where is Levi?_'

'_About two minutes out and right behind me,_' Harpuia responded. '_How's the link?_'

Phantom was about to ask what Harpuia meant, but realized he was asking about the communications link between their middle siblings. '_Levi's sure you're a Maverick, but she's not noticed that I'm here yet, which gives us a distinct advantage. They're still under the impression that that thing in the city is Father, so Fefnir's refusing to leave his side, which Levi's backing._'

'_Emotional support, I'm guessing?_' Harpuia started to level out in his flight, dropping low but remaining just out of Leviathan's reach.

It was a moment before Phantom responded. '_I would figure as much._'

'_I'm on approach now,_' Harpuia informed him, even as the unit banked into a wide turn that would bring him to a landing just outside of the copse of trees where Phantom was hiding.

Leviathan slowed considerably when she realized where Harpuia was headed, and when he banked for a landing, she stopped completely, still in twenty feet or so of water, clearly hesitating. He wanted her up on the land, out of the water. She was torn between rushing up there and asking Harpuia _what the hell happened? _and staying here, in the water, where she was considerably safer, where she had the decided advantage. She knew he was likely Maverick now, that Harpuia wouldn't just want to chat. She floated backward several feet, clearly recalculating. If she was killed or captured, Fefnir would be alone.

Harpuia landed with the same elegance and grace he'd always had, coming to a full stop near one of the taller trees and sitting down next to it, resting against it, eyes closed. He knew it would be difficult for Leviathan to make the choice to approach him, but if he looked nonthreatening? Maybe that'd be enough.

If it came down to it, though, he'd try to establish a link. If he was willing to talk, maybe she'd misread that as not being infected. Maybe that would be the push she needed.

When Harpuia landed and just settled with his back to one of the trees, like it was just another day, Leviathan's heart broke. She knew that Mavericks were able to expertly impersonate the person they were masquerading as, that they could be walking around in that person's body for _weeks_ before being found out. This gesture meant nothing. She scanned again, reaching outward, checking to see if he was truly alone. He didn't have his sabers, but she had her ranseur. But to approach this way…there was no way he had peaceable intentions. Mavericks did not try to negotiate, they only killed. Infected and killed.

It was taking a while for her to make her mind, and the more Harpuia thought about it, the more he was sure that she'd reject a link and bolt, thinking he would try to pass the infection along those channels. For a moment, he idly wondered if that was possible, then shook his head, pulling off his helmet and setting it in the sand beside him. He wouldn't call to her, not aloud, wouldn't let her know for certain that he knew she was there. '_She's not buying it,_' he sent to Phantom.

'_Give her time. Knowing Levi, she's got herself tangled in an internal argument between the logical choice of running the hell away and the emotional choice of seeing if you're somehow _not_ Maverick._'

Phantom was right: Leviathan was weighing her options, knowing that if, by some chance, Harpuia wasn't Maverick…no, he'd have come _home_ if he weren't. What _happened_? There was no way that he hadn't felt her scans, no way he hadn't recognized it as her. Harpuia was a lot of things, but he wasn't stupid. He knew full well she was there just as she knew full well that he was luring her. He was the bait, but to what end?

She realized that if she left now, she really might never see him again. If she left now, he could leave and go attack people, kill people, and whose hands would that blood truly be on? Wouldn't she be at least a little bit accountable because she let him get away?

She let out a shuddering breath, not quite a sob, but it was obvious she was distraught. She had to take a moment to steel herself. She had a duty to carry out, a duty to Neo Arcadia, to those people, human and Reploid alike, that lived there. Her hand brushed the wrecked saber at her hip as her grip on her ranseur tightened in the other. She drifted forward, the seabed rising up below her, closer and closer, until her booted foot hit the sand, and she rose from the sea, dripping with saltwater, pausing when she was about knee-deep. This was her first good look at him without the water's surface between them.

Now that was a bit more reassuring, Harpuia thought, and he reached out for Levi with a scan, wanting to make sure she was okay. Quickly recoding his eyes, he let them open once they were his familiar green again. "Hey," he called out softly, smiling a bit at her.

Leviathan did not smile back. The look on her face was indescribable, though it was obvious she was keeping her expression as neutral as she could. If she had to pick an emotion, then it would be anger that was foremost, then grief. Then anger again. If he was out here, if he was out here and didn't even have the decency to be Maverick…

She was going to _kill_ him.

Still gripping her ranseur tightly, though she wasn't holding it in a battle stance, she stepped forward, out of the surf. She didn't leave the wet, packed sand, however, though the tide was low enough that it didn't reach her when it lapped forward. "What are you doing, Harpuia?"

Harpuia shrugged. "Not all too sure. Staying the hell away from the city, I know that much. No one responds well to a unit being attacked by a known Maverick, and I didn't want to have to go back and explain to Master X that I couldn't carry out the order." He pushed himself to his feet. "And part of me is hoping you'll at least forgive me for the silence and the deception. I don't want to end up retired over something as…messed up as all of this is." He noticed the armaments on her legs then. "My saber? Levi, what…?"

Yes, anger would be the emotion of the day. Before, she'd been trying to at least keep her face neutral, but now? She hadn't been so angry in…she didn't even know when. Fueled by grief, the emotion fired through her body like an electric crackle. "You were _dead_. Harpuia, _you let us think you were dead_?" She wasn't even yelling. Her voice was low and shaky, her shoulders trembling with the barely-contained emotion. "Why do you _think_ I'm wearing your weapon?" When it was broken beyond repair, when she barely knew how to _hold_ a saber, let alone wield one.

"I would have been good as dead with the way Master X is running that city," Harpuia countered. "I…What was I supposed to do, Levi? I can't kill my own brother. He's…" The Guardian looked down. "I know that his being infected would mean that it's not him anymore, but…what was I supposed to do?"

"You _should_ have contacted me, Harpuia. Or Fefnir. You need to be _tested_. Fefnir and I underwent extensive testing, you need the same." He needed to be quarantined in the meantime. He needed to not be talking like he hadn't just _hurt her_. She trembled again. If Harpuia wasn't positive for the virus…well, they could have spun the tale to say that Phantom managed to get away. Originally. Now? "You've incriminated yourself by staying away, Harpuia." Her mind was racing, trying to decide what would be the best course of action from here. Assuming he wasn't lying through his teeth about not being Maverick.

She reminded herself once again that more than likely, this was _not_ her older brother, not any more.

"So I'm screwed either way," Harpuia sighed, rubbing at his eyes as he let out a tired sigh. "And here I thought taking some time to myself would let me clear my mind and the air instead of making the problem worse." He sagged a bit where he stood, his body language all but asking her for a hug. "For whatever it's worth, Levi, I am truly sorry."

Leviathan gripped her ranseur tightly and she had to force herself to _not _take a step back. She was agitated, exhausted from grief, from the roller coaster ride her emotional matrix had been taking her on for the past few days, and right now, she knew she couldn't afford to trust Harpuia. "I'm sorry, too, Harpuia," or whoever he was. "I am going to ask you to stay _right there_. I am going to call my lieutenants. You need to be tested." And really, they should be here by now. But she wasn't going to transport Harpuia alone. That was far too dangerous.

That was the second time she's brought up testing. "Tested? Tested for _what_?" And the look on his face a moment later meant that it had registered. "Levi, we're _immune_."

"Phantom was supposed to be immune, too, Harpuia. Stay there." Her voice had begun to take on the tone she used when addressing those ranked below her in the Meikai army.

Harpuia looked absolutely taken back by her comment, and the confusion was evident on his face. "Levi," and he sighed. "Levi, I fought him. I fought Phantom and I've fought Maverick units before, those truly insane because of the infection," and he shook his head. "I don't think Phantom was infected. Despite the order out against him…he's not Maverick because of a virus, because of an infection." Harpuia hazarded a few steps toward Leviathan, concern and remorse written over his features. "Levi…"

Leviathan's eyes widened and she froze. "Are you trying to imply that Phantom went Maverick_ of his own will_?" She sounded affronted, offended on Phantom's behalf. "Do you think I'm _stupid_?" Did he honestly think she'd buy that? When he began to step toward her, her expression shifted instantly, from confusion to anger, and in one fluid motion, she was in an offensive stance and swiped at Harpuia with her ranseur, a warning rather than an attack with intent. "_Stay where you are, Harpuia!_"

Harpuia's motions were practiced and fluid, hand moving just inside of the arc of her ranseur's blade and stopping the motion of her weapon. Thankfully, her grip on the ranseur was tight enough that when he pulled, she followed, and he wrapped his arms around her, holding her tightly. "I'm so very sorry, Levi," he said, nuzzling into her as his eyes recoded back to scarlet.

She began shaking again as tears began to fall despite herself, her frame trembling even as Harpuia held her tightly, her arm with the ranseur locked into place. She couldn't push him away effectively in this position, didn't have the freedom of motion to force herself out of his grip. Part of her didn't want him to let go, even as her rational side was screaming at her to _get away from him_. With her other hand, she felt along her hip, finding Phantom's kunai, the small blade the best option she had of getting free. She needed to get out of here, back into the ocean where she was _safe_ and she knew what she was doing.

"I'm sorry, Leviathan, I really am," and Harpuia began to pull away from her, looking toward the ground, eyes catching the way that her hand was moving towards the kunai hanging from her hip. "It should have never come to this," and blazing red eyes snapped up to meet hers as his voice morphed into a low growl, "but we're here for you now, _little sister_."

Her own eyes opened wide and she gripped the kunai, unsheathing it and slicing upward, pulling back from Harpuia, her eyes locked on his. Red. _Red eyes_. The grief slammed into her anew, because now? There was no doubt. Harpuia and Phantom were both dead to her. And Harpuia just said that _we_ were here for her now. Phantom. Where was he? She began scanning more broadly, her systems going into high alert: she needed to located that littlest brother, and locate him _now._ He wasn't an issue if he couldn't surprise you. She threw the kunai at Harpuia: even if small blades and thrown weapons weren't her expertise, she still knew how to do it well enough, and right now, she needed distance between herself and him.

A blur of black exploded out of a nearby shadow, cutting between Leviathan and Harpuia, Phantom coming to a stop a short distance away, kunai held tightly between two fingers. "Thank you for returning my weapon, sister," he said, sheathing the kunai.

Fefnir had felt the tremor in their link, a panicked cry unconsciously fired across, and he shuddered as he sent to her, '_Leviathan, what's wr—_'

Phantom made a dismissive sound as he slammed a blockade on their connection. "The great _Fairy Leviathan_ asking for help?" he chided, his tone derisive. "I thought you were a better fighter than that, sister."

"Perhaps she's getting soft," Harpuia teased, taking to the air and quickly moving so that Leviathan was trapped between him and Phantom.

Given the chance, Leviathan would have begun on the offensive, laying into Phantom first (mostly because he was in front of her and couldn't fly away), then moved into the water to escape much of Harpuia's wrath. Given the chance, Leviathan would also have screamed at both of them, her grief and anger overflowing. She wasn't given the chance.

Once Harpuia was in place behind her, Shadow materialized out of her shadow, catching her around the middle as he swiped a Shadow Blade across her neck, shorting her out and shutting her down. She slumped forward, but didn't fall to the ground. "Your brother will be livid," Shadow told the two of them.

Phantom grinned a bit at the thought, his eyes reverting back to their normal black as he shut down his connection to Fefnir and Leviathan's link now that she was offline. "Oh, livid is only going to be the start of it." Fefnir never did well with any sort of upset to his regimented lifestyle, and this? "You and I are going to need our Armored Phenomenon forms to handle _just_ him when we take the city."

"You sound excited," Harpuia noted, following the two back into the shadows, only to have Phantom step back out with the mockup of her ranseur.

"Want to do the honors?" Phantom asked, unsheathing his katana and offering the weapon to his brother.

"Sure," and Harpuia tossed the weapon in the air, igniting the katana and slicing through the ranseur with practiced ease, the remains of the mockup falling to the ground in three pieces. Reaching down, he tossed the bladed section idly into the air.

A kunai effortlessly pierced the center of the ranseur's blade, a heavy thud sounding as the two pieces of metal embedded into a nearby tree. "Let's go," and Phantom was back through the shadows immediately, taking his sister's limp body from Shadow and waiting for Harpuia to grab the chocolates.

The items secured, the trio sped off through the emptiness back toward the Resistance base.


	37. Hell Hath No Fury

_A Guest reviewer brought up a good point in a review last week, and we'd like to take the time to address that issue. It was something we'd already figured out, but hadn't really spelled out in the content of the story. The issue brought to the fore was that X's Buster is, in game canon, said to be a great deal stronger than anything the Robot Masters had and therefore, could rip through them like a wet tissue._

_ HarunaRei and Midnyght do remember this being mentioned in the games. HarunaRei is more familiar with Classic and thus, it was up to her to figure out how we were working this back in the outlining stages. _

_ Even though this is game canon, Capcom is not known for its well-developed plotlines or intense worldbuilding. Consider this point from a practical standpoint. X was a single design generation ahead of Rock. A single design generation. He was only one step ahead of the Robot Masters, and what was Light always saying was the most profound difference?_

_ His mind. X has a far more developed mind and is able to make real moral decisions, something the RMs aren't able to do due to the Three Laws essentially preventing them from having true free wills. _

_ More importantly and far more pressingly, there were wars actively going on in 20XX. Wars between the robots, fought in the name of mankind. Who here wants to go to war with a WWII-era plane?_

_ I don't. And neither did Dr. Light. You'd be a fool to think he didn't upgrade Rock as time went on, and that includes weapon and armor._

_ As for the industrial models, they'd have had to be upgraded periodically to keep up with the growth of technology. Light Robotics was on the cutting edge; his Robot Masters had to be as well. _

_ Even if Light wasn't directly upgrading the industrial units' weapons, there'd be very little power difference in 20XX and 22XX. Take Elec, for example. He uses just electricity when he fights. You know what hasn't changed since the dawn of time? Electricity. It's pure energy, governed by the laws of physics. There is no improving on it, only controlling and channeling it. And it's shown in the games and manga that he can control it._

_ And then Wily stole X's schematics, and from there, Zero was born. I don't know about you, but if I was Light and my shiny new android's schematics were stolen by a madman that makes murder machines, I'd upgrade the ever-loving shit out of my main battle bot. Dr. Light loved Rock and truly cared about him. I do not believe for a second that from the Seventh War, Rock wasn't on par with X's technology in terms of physical construction. He had to be for his own protection._

_ Because Wily would have used X's data to upgrade his Robot Masters. He's making honest-to-God bids to take over and/or destroy the world. His main foil just came up with something that could blow a lot of what he has out of the water._

_ Line up, DWNs! It's time for a massive overhaul!_

_ In short, it was an arms race. _

_ And now, in 22XX, it's demonstrated that Zero and X are still viable fighters despite having technology that's over two centuries old. You know who else uses technology that old? The Robot Masters. _

_ The only unit that didn't have regular access to upgrades was Blues, but he's a threat for a wholly different reason. His antisocial tendencies aside, he's powered by something that, if detonated, would probably wipe much of mainland Asia off the map. Something that, if harnessed, could power all of Neo Arcadia for centuries on end. That's the battery that charges his Buster._

_ I don't know about you, but I would not want that thing pointed in my direction._

_ And then there's the fact that while a gun from the 1700s isn't as advanced as the ones from today, it can still blow your brains out. Medieval swords still cut and despite us having antidotes, snake venom still kills. Yes, technology's improved, but that doesn't make us (or our technology) impervious. _

_And now, back to our regularly-scheduled authors' notes!_

_Emotional roller coasters are no fun, and poor Leviathan's just been on the ride of her life for the last month or so. Understandably, her reaction to finding out that neither Phantom nor Harpuia are Maverick is not going to be pretty. But there was a peace offering prepared for her, as well as an unexpected bit of comfort from a legend she hadn't known was still alive._

* * *

><p>Shadow chose Cerveau's lab for them to emerge into, the Robot Master still carrying Leviathan's ranseur as he sent a notice to X via their link: yes, they have his daughter and no, she was not happy. Shadow did not want to be around when she woke, thank you very much, and would not be held responsible for what ensued.<p>

Phantom laid Leviathan's body gently on one of the exam tables, releasing her helmet and letting her hair down from the bun she normally wore it in, the brown locks fluttering down around her shoulders.

"Taking her armor off isn't going to help her any," Harpuia noted, setting out the boxes of chocolates, leaving them closed and wrapped just in case Leviathan decided that the treats were better suited strewn about on the floor.

"It's just her helmet, Harpy," Phantom countered, setting the armor down on a small cart next to him.

Harpuia noticed Phantom's restrained body language. "You scared too?"

"A little bit," Phantom admitted.

"Scared of what?" X walked in then, looking at his daughter's prone form. "Her not taking well to the fact that her supposedly Maverick brothers just attacked her after _recoding their eyes_?" They knew all too well how badly Leviathan responded to their pranks before, and this one obviously was going to take the cake for Bad Idea of the Century.

"That," Phantom agreed, "but more so her just not taking well to everything that's happened."

"She isn't taking my death at Phantom's hands all that well, so to see me again? And she knew I was Maverick the minute she realized it was me." Harpuia shrugged. "Whatever happens, happens. I had a good laugh."

"I don't even want to think about the rampage Fefnir's going on now that he knows we have her."

X looked to Phantom at that. "You grabbed her while she was comm linked?"

Another shrug. "Just makes it all the more imperative that Levi not kill us then?" Phantom said, though there was an unease in his voice.

X rolled his eyes, his halo shimmering green before he faded out of sight. "I'll do what I can if she gets out of control, but I'm fully willing to let her kick your asses for this."

Cerveau looked between the two male Guardians, then glanced to where X's form disappeared from view, "Should I step outside?" And pray she didn't break too much?

Phantom and Harpuia looked at each other for a moment before chorusing out, "That's probably a good idea."

Once Cerveau had stepped out, Shadow moved over to Leviathan again, "Once I administer the antidote, she'll wake in under a minute," were they ready?

Phantom handed off his katana to his sensei, his Cross Star still sitting in X's room next to Harpuia's sabers. "If you don't mind returning that to Father's room. The fewer weapons she has access to, the better." And both brothers jumped onto a far exam table, Phantom crouching on the tabletop as Harpuia sat on it, letting one leg dangle over the side, hugging the other limb.

"Ready as we're going to be," Phantom said after a moment.

It took exactly thirty-three seconds for Leviathan to wake. She snapped online, her systems checking that yes, she was whole, in one piece, before moving straight into full-on battle mode. A unit she hadn't sensed appeared after Phantom, grabbed her around the middle, and then the world went dark. She was still angry and when her eyes snapped open, it was the ceiling of a strange lab that was the first victim of her glare. She knew Phantom and Harpuia—or whatever had once been them—were nearby, she _knew_ they were fucking with her, and it_ pissed her off_. She abruptly sat upright, not needing to take a moment to adjust blood flow the way a human would. It was at this point that she fully registered that she was unhelmeted: her hair swept over her shoulders, free and loose. Someone had not only removed her helmet, but also took her hair down. _That_ felt like a violation.

Phantom and Harpuia were both immensely lucky that there was not so much as a spare screwdriver within easy reach of Leviathan. With how livid she was when she finally fixed her gaze on them, even a common kitchen spoon could have become a deadly weapon.

Harpuia had been the first to tense, knowing _that_ look in Leviathan's eyes. She hated fighting, hated senseless violence, but she wouldn't pass up a decent spar. This, however? This wasn't a spar.

They had just pissed her off something fierce.

"Hey, Levi," Phantom greeted, a shaky smile coming to his face. Internally, he knew that she was going to give them hell for what they'd done.

Both Harpuia and Phantom looked immensely nervous, and as far as Leviathan was concerned, _they should be_. Had they hidden when she woke, she would have hunted them down. As it was, she swung around on the examination table, noting that it's lack of movement meant it was fastened to the floor: pity. Her legs dangled over the side for an instant before she slipped off the table and onto the floor, still leveling that glare at them. Her gaze flickered away from them for an instant, taking an inventory of the room: was there anything she could use?

She did note the chocolates on the table, like some kind of peace offering, and decided that she'd use those as a last resort: the chocolates would be a waste on these two. There was her helmet, the cart…

Wait. Mavericks with _chocolates_? She stopped and stared openly at them. "You two…you two went through _all of that_ and you don't even have the decency to be Maverick?" She hadn't been yelling before, but she was now. She grabbed her helmet and kicked the cart straight at the table that Phantom and Harpuia were taking shelter on.

Phantom and Harpuia both dodged, the ninja flipping off of the table in a flurry as Harpuia kicked his thrusters on, bolting across the room. "The decency to be—" and Phantom had to dodge Leviathan's helmet. "How can we be Maverick? We're _immune_!"

"And it's not like we had a choice in the matter!" Harpuia fired off, ducking a few weapon pieces that Cerveau had left on one of the other tables. "What were we supposed to do, go back into the city and tell that lying piece of scrap that we knew he isn't our father?"

Phantom's eyes went wide at that. "Harpy, no one told her about—" and he had to dodge a condenser ring, catching the object as it sailed past where his head had been a moment before, setting the item down on a nearby cart.

"_Did you honestly think I'd just play along with your sick little game?_" Leviathan was almost screaming now as she grabbed one of the screwdrivers from the nearest tool cart, whipping it at Harpuia's head, her mind taking a bit longer to catch up with what he'd just _said_. Lying piece of scrap? Not their father? Her helmet had rolled across the floor, toward her, and she bent down to scoop it up. "What the _hell_, Harpuia!" Her gaze veered to Phantom, stepping over fallen tools and parts as she approached the youngest. "What do you mean, no one told me? _What else have you two failed to tell us?_"

"When did I have time to tell you?" Phantom fired back, jumping clear of Leviathan's reach. "You just woke up twenty different kinds of pissed off! When did we have a chance to tell you that the thing posing as our father is a failed copy?"

"You just did!" Harpuia called out, pulling the screwdriver out of his left arm. Geez, when Levi was pissed…

"_What the hell else are our links for, you asshole?_" Leviathan found a much heavier tool in the form of a welder, and lobbed it at Phantom in response to his retort. "_You two were alive and well the entire time and, what, Fefnir and I can go to hell?_" She was running out of things to throw at them, which was pissing her off all the more, and she was just about to the point where bludgeoning them with her helmet was very appealing.

"You would have denied a link to a Maverick unit!" Phantom fired back, wincing as he stepped back again, the welder having contacted very solidly with his right knee, and his nanites were currently busying themselves trying to reconstruct the joint. Offlining his sensory relay for the area, Phantom hobbled back, trying to use his arms to deflect whatever else Leviathan was going to throw at him.

Or, considering her proximity, whatever she was going to hit him with.

"There are less intimate links than that one! You could have left a goddamn _message_! None of us wanted to think you were a Maverick until Harpuia was taken!" After that, there'd been no doubt about it. She was in striking range of Phantom now, and she cracked him with her helmet once, twice, as she screamed at him. "Do you have any idea what this did to me? To Fefnir? And, what, you two decide to reintroduce yourselves with some kind of a sick _prank_? It's not funny, Phantom!" After the third hit, she realized that she was losing control of her motor functions, her arm no longer responding properly to her processor, and she dropped the helmet, a shudder going through her body as she realized she _couldn't move._

A form started to appear from the far corner of the room, slowly moving towards Leviathan and Phantom, and X slowly flickered back into full visibility, his halo shifting from aqua to a more vibrant blue as he stopped cloaking. He approached Leviathan slowly, seeing the tears already forming in her eyes, and he let his hack release as well as his ethereal arms wrapped around his daughter's trembling form. "Leviathan…my baby girl…" and he nuzzled against her, the soft pulse of his energy tickling her sensors. "Stop. You don't…Leave them be. You're safe now. You're home."

Leviathan broke down then, immediately recognizing X, the _true_ X, even if he was in this form, even if he didn't have his body. That he couldn't properly hold her only made it worse, and she began sobbing in earnest, covering her face, her shoulders shaking with every sob, her emotional matrices completely overloaded by everything that happened. Slowly, she shook her head, as if the motion could set the world right again.

Phantom, despite the nanites still working to set his knee properly, hobbled over to Leviathan, joining in on the hug even though he was careful to avoid pushing through their father.

Harpuia joined a moment later, providing a shoulder for her to cry on.

Or punch, if she so desired. He'd take the hit willingly at this point.

Red light pulsed from X's halo, reaching out to cocoon all three of his children, and for a moment, he wished Elec had figured out how to shield Reploids as he did Robot Masters. Levi was in need of some _serious_ hugging after this stunt. "I'm sorry for what they must have put you through, Levi," and X's hand ran over her hair, the fibers sticking out a bit as his hand passed over them, "but they would have gone ahead with this even if I did tell them not to." He smirked a bit then, the expression equal parts mirth and mischief. "If it'll make you feel any better, I'll let you have the bed in the room and they can bunk on the floor."

Leviathan felt drained, emotionally drained, so instead of hitting Harpuia, though part of her still wanted to, she curled into his embrace, resting her head on his shoulder, though it didn't do much to quiet her sobbing at first. At least she wasn't swinging anymore. She nodded to X's words: yes, the bed would be hers. They could stay on the floor.

Harpuia pulled on her slightly, looked to Phantom so that the younger would release her, and he picked his sister up. "Let's get you down to the room and plugged into a charger. We'll have Cerveau do maintenance on your armor in the meanwhile and have you looked over when you're fully charged."

Phantom nodded softly. "It is getting late, and it's been a day for everyone," even if his only real issue was his knee, which his nanites and X's energy had repaired by now.

"I'll see the three of you tomorrow," X said, finally moving back. "I'll explain everything I can tomorrow, Levi," and he cast a soft, comforting smile at his daughter before relinquishing himself to Cyberspace.

Leviathan didn't argue with either of them, her shoulders still trembling slightly as she worked to bring her emotional matrix under control, wrapping her arms around Harpuia's shoulders when he lifted her.

Phantom grabbed her helmet from where she'd dropped it, collecting the boxes of chocolates as well, before running to catch up with Harpuia and falling in step beside him as they headed for the lift. "We are sorry," Phantom said softly, even if the prank had been fun. Well, fun up until the point she started attacking them. "And we'll start making it up tomorrow. There's a lot of people I think you'll be happy to meet. The progenitors made it here safely, and they're both alive and well, and," he was smiling widely at the last part, "they're our uncles, Levi."

"And they weren't the only ones," Harpuia said, smiling as they stepped onto the lift. "Two more of our uncles are here, and one of Master Zero's siblings. And I'm sure Master Zero would be delighted to finally meet you."

"And Fefnir, eventually," Phantom said, nodding.

Leviathan's eyes widened, though her voice was soft now, "Uncles?" As in Father's brothers? What…the _progenitors_? They were that old? How had they even survived that long? "Wait, Master Zero is here?" Since when? …Where _were_ they, anyway?

Phantom nodded. "Uncles, as in Father's older brothers. Uncle Rock's actually his direct progenitor model, and yes, Master Zero is here. Would you like me to let him know to meet us in Father's room?"

"You should invite him anyway," Harpuia said, his own smile bright and excited. "You told him the story of the final battle of the Elf Wars. Maybe we can have him tell it to us like Father used to when we were little?"

"You told him that story?" Without everyone there? Leviathan frowned at Phantom, though she didn't really make the effort to lift her head off of Harpuia's shoulder, so the effect was diminished.

Phantom flushed a little as they stepped off the lift. "I…Levi, Master Zero's memories have been damaged. I told him the story to help him remember." He hadn't meant to offend anyone, though he did message Zero to let him know that he should come meet X's daughter.

Harpuia held Leviathan a bit tighter, a little closer, as he continued down the hall, and he smiled when he saw a familiar flash of red armor waiting at the turn in the hallway that led to their room.

"Hey, Harpuia, Phantom," Zero greeted as they turned the corner, and he smiled at Leviathan. He'd have offered her his hand, but the way she was curled around Harpuia, he simply bowed. "Leviathan, I presume?"

She smiled, not at all outwardly ruffled that she was meeting this Legendary Maverick Hunter under these circumstances. As though she didn't just have an emotional meltdown and wasn't being carried downstairs. "It's good to finally meet you, Master Zero." Although, she did clutch Harpuia just slightly harder, out of excitement rather than anxiety. Because this? Well, it didn't make up for Phantom and Harpuia's pranks, but it certainly made her night better.

There was something in her body language, something that she wasn't really letting display outwardly, and Zero shook his head. "Part of me wonders if I still have enough military sway with your father to get away with reprimanding you both for whatever it is you did," and he sent a particularly poignant glare towards Phantom. "If he told you anything much about me during those story-filled nights, you should know by now that I don't take well to certain behaviors in the Zeroth." He had recalled how tight a ship he'd run back in the day. Sighing, he reached out, motioning to Harpuia that he'd take Leviathan from there.

Leviathan wrapped her arms around Zero's shoulders, glancing back to Harpuia as Zero straightened with her in his arms. Fortunately for Zero, she was considerably lighter than Rock. She was a bit surprised to hear Zero refer to them as members of his fabled Zeroth unit and she couldn't help the slow smirk that found its way to her lips as Zero reprimanded them.

And he hadn't even heard what they'd done. Or what she'd done to make them pay for it.

"So, my room, or your father's?" he asked.

"Father's," Harpuia replied, "sir."

"You can drop the military act for now, Harpuia," Zero noted, "but you're both running through cadences with me tomorrow. _Twice_. And sparring."

Phantom actually paled at that.

"So," Zero said, turning around and looking to Leviathan with a comforting smile, "I hear you're the polearms expert in the family."

Leviathan flushed despite herself. Master Zero was someone told about in bedtime stories, and not just for them, not just because X was their father. Reploids everywhere knew him as a hero, someone who everyone looked up to, someone who everyone wanted to be like. Or at least be like that image of him. "I specialize with ranseurs," she finally managed (where was her weapon, anyway?), "although I am experienced with several polearm types."

"You know any cadences with them? I've got a few weapon specialization programs, but I don't remember any of my cadences, which is why I have your brothers training with me. Since Cerveau is building replacements for my Maverick War-era weapons, I was wondering if you could show me a few things with the naginata. I'm a bit rusty after a century-long nap and figured that if I had developed cadences, you'd know them." He really hoped she had. Now that he'd started getting back into the swing of things, he hated that there was still so much he couldn't remember.

"I do," and she was quite happy to share that with him, "Although I adjusted most of them to underwater combat. I remember the original cadences as well, though. They work for different polearm types." Naginata, glaives, guisarmes, ranseurs…well, the basic idea was the same for each, even if different blades were applied differently.

Zero laughed as they stepped into X's room, the android resting Leviathan into the charger pod, brushing her hair aside to plug her into the machine. "Don't worry too much about the modifications. It took a while to get Harpuia to stop flying in the midst of a cadence first time we ran through them."

Harpuia's eyes were on the ground the moment Zero mentioned that.

"So, we going to trade off?" he asked. "Stories I haven't heard for one that you all love?"

She relaxed into the charger pod, leaning back slightly as she shifted. It was strange to be in here with her helmet off and her hair down, and, now that she looked down at herself, her armor was scuffed and dirty. She remembered Harpuia mentioning having her armor serviced and, really, no time like the present. She unhooked her bracers first, removing them with practiced ease, before addressing her brothers. "I'm going to remove my armor. Would either of you mind running it upstairs to be serviced?" Not that they had much of a choice: she was plugged in and settled already.

Both units nodded; they'd be coming back to the room, but the more they did to make up for their prank, the sooner Leviathan would be able to move on from it. That, and they wanted to try and get back in Zero's good graces. It wasn't a good idea to have your Unit Commander mad at you, after all.

Phantom grabbed the helmet from where he'd set it down with the bag of chocolates, taking Leviathan's bracers as well, leaving Harpuia to grab her vest and boots.

Once they had her armor, both units left, half-running from the room in their effort to be to Cerveau's and back by the time Zero started telling the story.

Zero shook his head a bit as the two left, turning to the bag that Phantom had deposited. "Chocolates?" he said, pulling the dozen boxes out and looking at them. "These yours?" he asked, turning to Leviathan.

"I never tolerated their pranks, even when we were kids," Leviathan frowned. "I think those were meant as a peace offering," although they'd gotten a sound beating anyway. She was glad that her armor was being serviced, though: her helmet had more than one or two nicks and dents in it now that she'd used Phantom as target practice with it. My, they did grab a lot of chocolate, though, didn't they? "I didn't get a chance to look. What kind did they get?" She needed to plan what order she'd be eating them, after all.

Zero smiled a bit at that, ignoring the chocolates for a moment as he pulled the top sheet off of X's bed. "First things first," he said, pulling her forward just enough to drape the sheet behind her back and over her shoulders. Smiling as he moved, he pulled the sheet down a bit, tucking it around her body but leaving her arms uncovered. "As for the chocolates, it looks like regular milk chocolate, milk chocolate with caramel, and dark chocolate with raspberry cordial. Looks like they nabbed some of the specialty stuff, though, by the boxes."

Specialty? "They knew I'd be very angry, then, if they got the good stuff," so she'd only be impressed if it was a gift of the good stuff with no trauma attached. But she was pleased either way: those were some of her favorites. "I'll have to alternate the boxes," alternate the flavors.

Yes, she fully intended to eat all twelve boxes. She, unlike human women, did not need to worry about weight gain.

"Would you like one of them now?" Zero asked. He knew that their systems had ways of turning food into very low-grade energy for their systems, had ways to process it, but would she want something like that right before hibernating? Then again, it wasn't like they had nightmares because of the things they ate.

Zero groaned a bit as a pair of memory files hit the repair queue, brushing fingers across his brow as he delayed the repair. Now was not the time to be repairing the files. He had X's kids to entertain, especially so for the lone daughter of the family. He was going to make a point of finding out exactly _what_ Phantom and Harpuia had done.

He'd talk with X about suitable punishments afterward.

"Sure. Do you like chocolate, Master Zero?" She had no intention of sharing with her brothers, but she couldn't not offer some to Zero when he was being so kind. And when he was _Zero_. She didn't know what kind of impression Phantom and Harpuia left on Master Zero, but she did know what kind she wanted to leave on him.

She couldn't have him thinking that Phantom and Harpuia's antics were the default in their family.

"Which box?" he said, laughing at bit as he moved for the table they were on, "and it's just Zero. Like I told your brothers, you're X's kids, so you don't need to be so formal with me. Well, outside of training, anyway. I expect the proper respect when we're training, but other than that?" He shook his head. "I'm not a Lieutenant Commander when I'm off-duty, Levi."

She couldn't help smiling a bit at Zero's words. "Alright, Zero, how about the caramels first?" She loved caramel.

Zero nodded, grabbing the top box of caramels and pulling the wrapping off, setting the ribbon aside as he opened the box. Tucking the bottom of the box into its lid, he handed the sweets to Leviathan. "Here you go," he said, pulling a chair over so that he could sit next to the pod.

She took the box from him, settling it on her lap in the pod and choosing one of the chocolates, tasting it and smiling. It'd been a _long_ time since she'd had anything like this, a long time since she could indulge. It was calming, actually, to have something little like this, even if she had to avoid thinking about the stunt Harpy and Phantom pulled earlier that day.

"X mentioned that you liked having chocolates for your birthday," Zero mentioned, looking to the Guardian.

Leviathan's eyes became wistful as she thought back on those early days, when everything had been…there'd been hope then. Now, it really felt like Neo Arcadia had gone to hell. "He would get us gifts for each of our birthdays each year. He said that even though it was a human custom, it was one he thought meant something to Reploids, too. That your birth is something that should be celebrated."

"That sounds like X alright," Zero said. "Even with us regarded as close enough to human to warrant being granted basic civil rights and liberties, he still pushed for us to integrate from early on." Zero smiled then, although there was a bit of a strain in it, like something else had come up connected to that thought. "I'd have to talk to X, though, see if he remembers what day I was activated with the Hunters. Figure that'd be close enough to a birthday, all things considered."

Leviathan nodded, "Humans that didn't know their birthdays usually used what day they were adopted, so you can use the day the Hunters adopted you." She popped another chocolate into her mouth, thinking back on old stories.

"Mind if I try one?" Zero asked, looking to the box. "I know you offered, but I don't want to be rude and just take one."

Harpuia and Phantom walked into the room then, dropping down on the floor as Zero took one of the offered sweets, biting into it and smiling faintly.

A moment later, Zero's eyes widened perceptibly, and he looked at the remaining half of his candy.

"Zero?" Phantom asked. "Zero, what's wrong?"

"Axl…" he said, popping the rest of the candy into his mouth, quickly eating it. "Axl used to get these for us after missions. Not these candies in particular, but chocolates with caramel." He looked forlornly at the floor, as if trying to force himself to remember more than the fractured memories he had. "Did…did X ever tell you any stories about him?"


	38. Loss and Gain

_First the baby, then the eldest, now the only girl, and Fefnir is suddenly an only child, the last of X's legacy. Grieving, raging, lost in this overwhelming spiral of emotions, he does the only thing he can: find a way to locate the Resistance so that he can lay his siblings to rest, break the Virus' hold on the shells of once-family. Abandoning his post at (Copy) X's side, he prepares for an assault against those that tore his family apart. And now that the guard posted to Copy X has stepped away, the scientist that promised hope comes with news that, as insane as it sounds at first, may be what this city needs. It's time to call a session with the Eight Gentle Judges._

* * *

><p>Fefnir screamed at the now-dead link between himself and his only remaining sane sibling, the shock of how quickly the attack happened sending his mind reeling."Leviathan! Levi! Fairy Leviathan, you get back on the link this instant! Don't tell me that you got duped by some half-baked evil twin! You better just be too busy kicking their sorry puppet asses to talk to me, do you hear me?" Tears of rage blurred his vision and, even knowing it was useless, he couldn't think of anything else to do. "Leviathan! <em>Leviathan<em>!"

Copy X looked up from his terminal the moment Fefnir started screaming, the words grating against his nerves as he bit back a snarl. Another general lost to the Mavericks, and Copy X sneered at the thought of how inept the original X had been in programming the immunity into his 'children'. No matter. "General Fefnir," he said softly, once the unit had fallen silent, "something happened to Leviathan?" His tone was cold, unemotional, but he kept his head turned away.

If Fefnir couldn't see the rage burning in his eyes, it'd be all the easier to keep up with the unit's belief that he was too grief-stricken to deal with this situation as their father would have.

Fefnir slowly clenched his left fist, resisting the urge to shoot randomly in his father's quarters. "Master X, while I appreciate your concern, I am fairly sure you know damn well what happened to Fairy Leviathan." He couldn't fathom why he felt the need to stress her title, but he couldn't bring himself to speak of her right now without using her full name. "She died. Or maybe worse, who knows? Because, you know, having one of our generals snap and kill another wasn't enough to make things around here change at all. Because having your highest-ranking forces cut in half wasn't enough to make you sit back and analyze the situation, and now it turns out that the one general didn't kill the other at all, or maybe he did and the Harpuia out there really is a sad mimicry of the original. And then there was one; or maybe three, depending on how you look at it. But it doesn't matter anymore. I'm done trying to wait for someone else to come up with a plan." The last Reploid general turned to leave. "Permission to leave my post." The words felt hollow and bitter on his tongue, but he knew he should leave X to grieve, since he was apparently so bad at doing it in front of his subordinates.

The copy's eyes narrowed a bit, and he swiped at the holo-screen, the device shutting off, and he sighed heavily. It was very far out of character for the Reploid behind him to use such language when he was actively on duty, even if he was known for being rather colorful around his troops. Copy X shook his head after a moment, waving one hand over his shoulder. "Dismissed, General," he said, relieved in a way to have the Reploid _finally_ out of his hair.

He just hoped that whatever Fefnir was planning on doing to blow off steam regarding the loss of his last remaining sibling wasn't going to make enough of a mess to warrant the last Guardian being marked Maverick alongside his siblings. "Don't do anything too foolish, Fefnir," he said as the unit stepped from his room.

Fefnir stepped out into the hall, still facing away from the object of his frustration. "Not to worry. I think I'll come up with a plan for once. Like I said, I'm tired of waiting for someone else to do that." He continued to walk down the hall, calling the lift up and waiting for it to arrive before speaking again. "After all," he said, letting the door close fully before he finished his sentence. "It's not like there's anyone left who's any good at it, right, Father?" He sent the signal to the lift to start down toward the floor the Zan'ei lieutenants were housed on.

The lift doors opened with the same hiss that accompanied their operation since they were built, but to Fefnir it was like they were opening for the first time. As terrible as the loss of his siblings was, he couldn't help but feel...new, somehow. It was as if there was no one else for him to leave other things to, and now he was the one to come up with something. Suddenly his mind felt sharper, his senses more acute than they had ever been.

If only he could share this feeling with Levi.

The thought of what they may be doing to her, what becoming a Maverick might entail, made it hard not to just blast everything in sight. He had to control himself now, he couldn't just go nuts and let Harpuia, the responsible one, clean up after him. He couldn't go bug Phantom, the quiet one, to blow off steam. And now...

Now he had to be the one with the plan. His little brother went nuts, took out the eldest, then they both got the girl. And if there was any chance that she wasn't Maverick yet, he was the only one who cared enough to risk his neck trying to get her back. And if it was too late, he had to take them all out before anyone else could see them like that.  
>He owed them that much, dammit.<p>

He walked down the hall, passing PZ units changing shifts who snapped to quick attention when they saw the only remaining general approaching. He knew that if this was the way he was going to be treated for the rest of his life, it was going to drive him insane. He had to nip this in the bud; Hanumachine could wait.

"Okay, listen. I realize the reputation I have going around the base. After all, I spent years cultivating the image of a hot-headed badass so I wouldn't have to spend too long earning the respect of others. I knew I was good, and I felt others didn't need to spend a bunch of time trying to get me to prove it. But I just lost almost my _entire family_ in the span of a few weeks. Yes, I am grieving," and his eyes fell to the useless blade casing at his side. "Yes, normally I would be highly subject to random acts of violence. But I can't afford to waste any more of my life and any more of the lives of what forces we have left by getting angry about it. So please, for the love of everything you hold dear, do _not_ walk on eggshells around me. If you have time to worry about how I feel, start thinking about how you're going to deal with having to kill your former commander. Then again, you guys are so cold you're probably not worried about it." He resumed walking down the hall towards Hanumachine's quarters. "And that means when you have to get to your shift, _don't worry about saluting to me unless I address you_!"

As Fefnir walked through the halls, he sent a request to open a comm channel with Hanumachine.

'_My condolences for General Leviathan's loss,_' the unit greeted. Word was getting around _quick_ that the Meikai leader's signal had just disappeared off of the network, and while there was some discussion that it may have been for something less serious than her Maverick sibling claiming her life, Hanumachine feared the worst, especially with the reports coming in from the lieutenants that were supposed to have been guarding her that there were no Mavericks where they'd been told to divert off to.

Just like when the city had been shut down the night they lost the progenitors.

'_Save it, monkey. I don't care about how anyone else feels about it. Besides, it's a bit beyond condolences at this point, isn't it? I just wanted to warn you I'm on my way to your quarters. I don't know how you ninja types operate, and I don't feel like springing some trap or getting a fireball to the face just as I open the door._' Fefnir stopped short of the door and cut the connection, waiting for the lieutenant to exit his room and spot him.

Shaking his head a bit at the general's tone, Hanumachine uncoiled from the lotus position he had been in, balanced precariously on his tail, and let himself drop soundlessly to the floor as his tail curled around his staff. "You are mistaken to think that my own room is protected as such," he said as he stepped into the hallway, "though that fear does leave me wondering if you've ever entered Hyleg's room without permission, General," as that Zan'ei did have a habit of leaving a string of booby traps in the few feet between the door and the main room of his quarters. "And I am curious as to why it would be a warning rather than a notice that my commanding officer wants to speak with me."

Fefnir smiled inwardly at Hanumachine's tone. _Now here is a lieutenant I can get along with,_ he thought. "Well, it seems you are as calm as I had heard you were. Good, because you're not going to like what I'm going to demand of you. Hence the 'warning'; although considering my own reputation I like to think that most consider warning and notice to be synonymous when dealing with me." The red-armored general gestured for Hanumachine to begin walking with him. "You were on your way to begin your patrol, yes? We can walk and talk."

"I was, or rather, I am," Hanumachine replied, falling in step slightly behind Fefnir as he transferred the staff to his right hand. He would have asked the Guardian what his demands were, but quickly figured that remaining silent would be the more prudent action; _something_ was bothering Fefnir, something, Hanumachine figured, had everything and nothing to do with the loss of Leviathan.

"Okay, I'm not going to mince words here." Fefnir locked eyes with the other Reploid. "Did Phantom ever share any information at all regarding the whereabouts of the Resistance base? Any clue will do, but I need somewhere to start." A dangerous look crossed the general's features. "And please don't hold any information from me; I may not be the type who can tell if you're lying right away, but I _am_ the type to make you pay for it. I want to at least try to rescue Leviathan, and if it's too late, I want to end this blasphemy before anyone else has a chance to be exposed. Besides, there's got to be a reason why those of us normally immune are getting infected. I intend to find out why, and if it's some Reploid's fault, I intend to make a new gun out of their skull. As you can imagine, that is a _ridiculous_ amount of animosity to hold in," and he stopped for a moment, reining in his emotions, his anger. "I'm not going to lie to you, lieutenant, I have _no idea_ why I'm not flying into a rage right now. But I assure you I have no intention of letting my anger get the better of me, just as I have no intention of letting it go. So I reiterate: tell me where to point the big shiny guns, and I won't have to point them at anyone here. Understand?"

"I'll be honest, General, and tell you that I have no clue as to where General Phantom said he was heading to, and I strongly hazard against believing anything that may have been said." Hanumachine continued on for a moment in silence. "You may want to speak with Phoenix Magnion, however. When your brother initially left the city, Phoenix was the one that relayed that we were not to attack him."

Fefnir considered what Hanumachine said about trusting Phantom's word. It was sound advice of course, but without any other leads at the moment, he had no choice but to either sit and wait, which in his opinion had cost him two of his siblings, or follow this road to wherever it may lead. "All right, thank you, Hanumachine. I apologize for my behavior, but at least I'm trying to keep it in for once, right?" He managed to attempt what he hoped was a reassuring smile, but felt grim all the same. "I'm going to go find Phoenix. I assume he should be on his way back _in_ from patrol at the moment, correct?"

"He should be on his way up to head for his room and a recharger," Hanumachine said with a nod. "We'll likely run into him once we get to the lifts. If that is all, General?"

There was really only one more detail he had to cover, which was good because they were nearly at the lifts. "I only ask for two things while I'm investigating Phantom's location. One is a bit obvious, and that is to keep an eye and ear out for any suspicious dealings. I feel as if I'm telling the wrong unit considering who you originally served under, but if you see anyone...out of character, I guess, be sure to tell Master X, as well as myself. The other, and more important detail," they rounded the final corner to the lift station just as the lift was arriving on their floor; Fefnir made his point quickly before the doors opened, lest his father be on the lift. "If at all possible, avoid telling my father for as long as possible. He most likely believes I'm just going to blow up a bunch of stuff and forget about it, and I'd like to keep it that way for as long as I can." The lift doors opened, and Phoenix stepped off on his way to his room, coming within earshot just as Fefnir bid his farewell to Hanumachine. "Good hunting, Lieutenant."

"The same to you, General," Hanumachine said as he boarded one of the lifts, "and understood."

As the simian Reploid took his leave to make his rounds, Fefnir turned his attention to the returning bird. "So, Phoenix, how was the patrol? Uneventful, I assume?"

"As uneventful as patrols can be, all things considered, General," Phoenix replied, "though I am a bit surprised to see you here, sir. From what I've heard, you've been at your father's side for the past few days. Is everything alright?"

The red Reploid resisted the urge to throttle Phoenix...barely. "As a matter of fact, no, they aren't. As I'm sure you're aware, I am now the only Guardian remaining that has not been...defeated? Do I even use such a term considering their current fate? Either way, that is little concern to you at the moment. I will be brief, as I know you wish to retire to your chambers. When Phantom left under the original termination order," forcing himself to admit that even at that point, his brother may have been a Maverick left a bitter taste in his mouth. "Did he leave any clue as to the location of the Resistance base? I just need to confirm something."

Phoenix bowed his head. "I apologize for the offense, General. I did not wish to throw salt on the wound, especially as fresh as it is for all of us, you most of all." His talons clicked against the floor as he shifted a bit. "As for General Phantom, he did leave coordinates with me in the event anyone requested them. I never verified them myself, but I would hazard to say that they were not legitimate," considering Phantom's current state.

Again he had it thrown in his face; _This is a bad idea._ It most likely was, but he had no choice if he was going to pursue the source of his siblings' corruption. He had to get to the bottom of this matter. For the sake of their memory if nothing else. He wondered to himself if this was how his father felt when he saw his comrades fall, one after the other.

"I'll accept the apology, seeing as no one could truly know how I feel about this anyway. As for the other matter, yes, I realize that this may be a foolish plan, if I were planning to assault the base alone. I may be known for my hot temper, but I'm not a fool. Even I wouldn't want to face Phantom and Harpuia alone, and that says nothing if they have an army at their backs. We don't even know if it's the Resistance that did this to them; has anyone ever considered that? It could be that somehow they're out there right now trying to defend themselves from what they must believe is a total extermination order. There could be a third party involved, one that has no interest in either of us, and just wants power. This third party may even be the ones responsible for the disappearance of the two progenitor models from our labs. Heck, for all we know, the red model woke up, killed the lights, threw the city into chaos, and waltzed out with the other one in tow!_ We don't know!_ There's too much about this we don't know! The progenitor models, their cores, the attack right after we found them, Phantom's infection, Harpuia and Leviathan's captures; it all somehow fits, but could the Resistance, an organization that we pegged as a sort of refugee camp for escaping Reploids, really have pulled all this off? I _need_ to know. So yes, I want whatever coordinates Phantom left for you. I'll check things out remotely before I risk venturing out of the city myself." Fefnir placed his hands on Phoenix's shoulders and leveled a dangerous glare at him. "I am _not_ in the mood to be coddled. Just tell me where he went."

Phoenix nodded, locating the file with the saved coordinates and sending a file transfer link request to Fefnir. "I did not mean to sound as if I was treating you as such. It has…it has not been easy to lose my commander as I have, and I cannot even begin to fathom how their losses must be affecting you. If you will allow it, sir, and if there does turn out to be some truth behind his words, I would like to join you if there is to be an offensive launched against the location General Phantom provided." It was one thing to realize that your superior officer was a Maverick. It was another thing entirely to sit idly by and let grieving family bear the responsibility of dispatching their lost relatives.

Fefnir downloaded the file, going over the contents as soon as the transfer was complete. As soon as he realized where the coordinates put the supposed Resistance base, he made a mental note to teach Anubis the proper way to scan an area. For the moment, he was going to have to assume that there was some trick to keeping them out of his student's sights, though he still linked up to a few of the nearby satellites in order to scan around for signs of activity. While he didn't find anything that looked recent, he felt that there was a reason for the desiccated appearance of the outer buildings: most people would pass over such a place after a few light patrols, figuring that nothing would survive long, conditions being what they were outside the dome. Under normal circumstances, he would be tempted to agree with that type of assessment, but that just made him suspect that perhaps Phantom was still himself before he left to play at being a Resistance member.

Or this was the mother of all traps, and thinking that this was a base was going to lead him right to the big 'X' on the ground that he wouldn't be able to see until he was standing right on top of it.

The only way to find out without going there himself would be to send someone. He had half a mind to send a Lieutenant, but they were all having to deal with increased patrols due to the distinct lack of Guardians left in the city. Not that it would matter too much if he was able to somehow fix this mess. That still only left either humans, which the Resistance would likely not fire on but tended to die easily, or Pantheon units, which the Resistance are _guaranteed_ to fire on but could take the damage, if they weren't dumb enough to walk right into the line of fire. He honestly had no clue who to send in. "Phoenix, tell me, what would you do in this situation? Here lies your target. It seems normal enough, and yet it may be some type of trap. You cannot go yourself, lest the city remain defenseless. The city also needs all of its lieutenants for patrols. Humans are out for obvious reasons, and sending Pantheons would just alert them of our knowledge of their location; they may be able to escape before we can send better units. So who should scout the area?"

"To be honest, sir, this _is_ a Maverick group you are dealing with, regardless of whether or not the individuals marked as such were infected before they were retrieved from the city. As much as I want to believe that General Phantom left of his own will and simply lied about his reasons for doing so, the fact remains that the first of the Guardians to leave the city returned and took the life of his eldest brother. Then we discover that said brother is not dead, as we were lead to believe, but dragged into this fight on the other side of the war, as another enemy of the city. What now has become of your sister is left to question and whatever hopes each of us may carry that she has not become the same soulless puppet as the two that fell before her." Phoenix sighed heavily, his wings folding down a bit. "As much as I hate to give this advice, General, I would think it best that you lead a squadron out to the location. Lock down remote access to the General's Armored Phenomenons—we need not give the Mavericks any more weapons to use against us—and ensure that the fate that befell them does not continue on to destroy any more of our forces, any more of our people. We are not defenseless without you. A dozen lieutenants remain, and enough Pantheon and Golem units to handle almost anything that can be thrown at them, especially with the emergency coding having been modified to account for whatever went wrong the night of the attack on the city."

Bright orange eyes blinked, then turned to the floor. "You need closure, General Fefnir, and answers about the family that has fallen to the scourge your father fought against for so many years, answers about _why_ they fell to it. Your father is immune, yet two of his sons became Maverick? There is something we are not seeing, sir, something that's affected them, that's changed them. For the sake of your and your father's mental health, we have to find out just what happened."

Fefnir considered what he had just been told for a moment, trying to figure out if he was just overthinking things when it came to this whole Maverick mess. In a way, Phoenix was absolutely right about needing answers, he was right about the city being able to take care of itself—for a while at least. It was time to be a General; he wondered for a moment what that truly meant. He was going to march off to what he suspected would be an all-out war between himself…

…and his former family. He began to make preparations in his head, dismissing Phoenix to a much needed recharge cycle, and deciding if he was going to need backup.

* * *

><p>Telesphoros stopped just shy of Copy X's door, bowing a bit to the guards. "Please let Master X know that Telesphoros is here to see him."<p>

It only took a moment before the door slid open, and Telesphoros bowed to Copy X as he stepped inside. "It's good to see you again," he greeted once the door had closed.

"Likewise," Copy X said, pushing himself to his feet. "How did your trips to the power plant go?"

"Better than I expected," Telesphoros answered, taking a seat in a nearby chair. "I was able to look over the coding and a good bit of the physical system. There were some minor coding errors that we fixed, so as soon as those changes are approved by the maintenance team, that will be taken care of."

"So it was just a coding issue?" Copy X asked. "Why hasn't it been fixed before now?"

"The coding error will only manage to bring the overall performance up by ten to twelve percent. The main concern is making up for the rest of the output," and here Telesphoros leaned back in his chair. "What you need is a permanently-linked capacitance boost converter."

Copy X tilted his head to the side at that, brows furrowing. "A what?" Engineering certainly wasn't his forte.

"A system by which the output charge is higher than the input charge," Telesphoros explained. "Normally, we could achieve this by using Energen Crystals, but there is a limit to how much a crystal can amplify the output."

"And there's something you can use stronger?"

The blond nodded, blue eyes worried at the thought. "There is one thing, yes," he replied.

"And?" Copy X asked, one hand opening towards Telesphoros in a 'what next?' kind of gesture.

"It requires the Dark Elf," the Reploid explained, turning his eyes toward the floor.

Copy X was on his feet, his chair skittering back, and his crimson eyes were blazing. "Are you _insane_?"

"Not at all," Telesphoros replied, unfazed by the unit's outburst.

"You need to have your processor checked out, Telesphoros," Copy X said, eyes narrowing. "The coding that allowed for the Dark Elf in the first place was an electric signal burst-fired into an Energen Crystal." That much he knew about the demon caged by the body in Sanctum Yggdrasil. "To use her when she's tied into the city's power supply? Telesphoros, you'd infect the entire city!"

"Not if she's cleansed of the defective coding that turned her into the Dark Elf in the first place."

Crimson eyes went wider at this. "You…you…" He stumbled back into his chair, looking at the blond. "You can purify her?"

"Cleansing her systems of the impurity that tainted her would be quite similar to the process by which the cure was first created for the Maverick Virus a century ago," and there was a slight nod here. "Your maker is familiar with the project, has studied the records and notes extensively, and believes that he can undo the damage that was done to her. From there, it's a simple matter of constructing a cage for her, a means of containing her, that ties into the power plant."

"This would have to be brought before the Council," Copy X said. "I can't authorize something of this magnitude without consensus. With the risk that Dark Elf poses to all of us, I'm sure that you can understand."

"But of course. It was already figured that I would have to bring this to the Judges' attention," already had his case ready. "That's part of why I came to visit you today. With the change in bureaucracy since you took the reins in the city, I wasn't sure how to petition for a session before the Judges."

Copy X frowned a bit. "You do understand why Council petition is no longer available to the citizenry?"

"I do," Telesphoros replied, "and am hopeful that the bar does not extend to me."

"With the news you bring, what you offer? Of course it doesn't. The more we can do to save this city, the better. And to purify the Dark Elf, to finally put an end to the threat that she poses?" This was a blessing, a light in the darkness, especially since the loss of the progenitors and the fall of three of the Guardians. "You and my creator can bring hope back to this city, a hope we desperately need."

"You have my contact information," Telesphoros said, getting to his feet. "Please let me know when I am to present my case before the Council. Until then, I bid you well and hope for the safety and sanity of your remaining Guardian."

It wasn't until after the lab assistant had left the room and Copy X turned back to his work that it hit him that Telesphoros knew of Leviathan's fall.

His fingers stilled over the keyboard at his terminal, his brow knitting in worry and confusion.

* * *

><p>Cubit Foxtar was the first of the Judges to arrive at the council chamber, bowing as he entered. "Master X, forgive me for asking this, but why was the content of your message so vague? And at what point did we start accepting petitions again?"<p>

"This is a special case, Foxtar," Copy X said, pacing as he was behind his seat at the table.

"You seem as if you are on edge," and that bothered the Judge a bit. Moving onto the main dais, he quickly took his seat, settling in as they waited for the others to arrive. "Is everything okay?"

"It's fine," Copy X said, moving to his own chair though he remained standing. Since Telesphoros' visit the day prior, it had been bothering him that the unit had known of the loss of Leviathan, disturbed by the fact that the news had gotten to him so quickly. Was it simply a matter of overhearing chatter as he headed for Copy X's chamber, or was there more about this unit that he didn't know?

The remaining seven Judges followed in short order, most respectfully silent despite the questions that each had about Master X's message from the previous day for the petitioned session.

"Master X," Deathtanz said as he bowed. "I, as I believe the rest of the Judges, am curious as to why and how a petition for a council session was granted. Did we not shut down the office shortly after you completed your maintenance cycle after Dark Elf's sealing?"

"You did. This was a personal request from…an old acquaintance." Copy X waited for a moment before excusing himself, having to leave the room in order to get a message out to Telesphoros.

As it was, he was about to be running late.

Just as Copy X was getting to the door, it swung open, Telesphoros stopping short to keep from running into the shorter Reploid. "Master X!" he exclaimed, a bit surprised. "I hope I'm not late. I got a bit caught up with my assignment, sort of lost track of the time."

"We were just settling in," and Copy X ushered the Reploid into the chamber, closing the door.

Inarabitta's eyes trailed the newcomer, curious as to the visor that the blond was wearing over his eyes, but he settled back into his seat as Copy X moved behind the table. "A scientist?" he asked suddenly.

"As if the visor would indicate something else," Flizard shot back.

"Technical assistant in Reploid engineering," Telesphoros provided, "and the visor could indicate any number of professions. Several varied branches of study utilize the visors for a bevy of capabilities."

Inarabitta had to bite back a smirk at the way Flizard bristled at the unit's words.

"Your number," Flizard demanded. "You should know better than to speak to any of us like that, citizen."

"Telesphoros," the blond replied, smirking a bit.

Several more gazes focused on the unit then.

"A named unit?" Hellbat asked. "Yet you are not one of ours."

"I am not," Telesphoros said with a nod, "though I have worked with Master X previously."

"During the sealing of Dark Elf," Copy X supplied. "Not all the units involved with that project were reassigned to Neo Arcadia Tower's research and engineering divisions."

Tretista looked to Copy X at that. "Master X, this is the first time I have ever heard you speak openly of the incident with Dark Elf."

"And rightly so," Copy X said, motioning to Telesphoros. "You have the floor."

Telesphoros nodded, looking to each of the Judges through his visor, the green-tinted material hiding his eyes. "Master X, honored Judges of Neo Arcadia, I stand before you today with a proposal that may, at first glance, seem the ramblings of a unit who has damaged their processor, I promise you it is anything but." He stopped for a second, eyes moving beneath the visor to take in the expressions of each member of the council. "For over a decade now, this city has faced numerous crises, seemingly insurmountable problems from several points, but I come before you today to suggest a means of repairing what may be the most vital of the damaged systems. Simply put, I have a suggestion to correct the power plant's reduced output."

Mantisk leaned back into his chair, a small smile playing onto his lips. "A suggestion? Let us hear it."

"I had spoken with Master X previously to gain access to the power plant. I wanted to see the coding and the structure, see what I could determine was wrong, if anything."

Foxtar frowned a bit at this. "I thought you said your field of expertise was Reploid engineering."

"It is now," Telesphoros answered. "Prior to the legislation that locked us into our current careers, I was working on engineering in several different fields alongside the scientist whose assistant I am."

"And this scientist's name?" Foxtar asked.

"Until our work can prove effective, he would prefer to remain anonymous."

Kelverian ticked his head to the side as he looked at the unit. "I cannot understand willingly letting one Reploid take the fall in the event that these plans are faulty or ineffective. Still, I am uncertain of the reasoning behind this requiring a session before the council."

"Ah, yes," and Telesphoros straightened a bit. "As to that. I have brought the matter before Master X, and his reaction was to ask if I had lost my mind. I hope that I do not incur a repeat of that question or a unilateral decision to bar me from further detailing our plan."

Volteel leaned forward, lacing his fingers together as he looked at the unit. "How mad was this idea that Master X would have thought as such?"

"The corrections that have been made to the coding for the plant will only bring the production up to about sixty-five percent at best. What's necessary is a capacitance boost converter tied into the power plant's systems to bring the output back up to required levels. By running the charge from the facility through the converter and then to the city's grid, it will make up for the lowered production."

"And the output flux?" Inarabitta asked.

"That was all in the coding. It has since been amended and, with your permission, can be sent to the maintenance team at the plant." He was silent for a moment, as if choosing his next words carefully. "The converter, however, needs an internal charging mechanism to create such a magnified output. Energen Crystals, as you know, provide something along those lines."

"So you're suggesting building a converter that uses Energen Crystals?" Flizard asked, frowning.

"No. The output percentage isn't nearly enough to handle what needs to be done. Rather, something more powerful is required."

Mantisk's smile fell at that. "You require Cyber Elves."

"And a fully-matured one," Volteel reasoned. "A permanent prisoner to the system," and he shook his head.

Telesphoros nodded. "Specifically, the system requires the Dark Elf."

The tension in the room magnified, and behind his visor, Telesphoros' eyes narrowed. They _did_ all fear her, fear her power, and thought him insane for his suggestion.

"I cannot allow this," Foxtar said. "Even if it would be for the city's sake, for us to fix what's wrong, we'd unleash a new age of Maverick destruction within the very walls of the city. The life we have built beneath the shell of the Eden Dome would be for naught, and you are lucky that we do not pass sentence against your life." That the suggestion had been even _considered_ to free the Dark Elf…

"Lucky indeed," Flizard agreed. "Her power tied into anything creates a plague worse than the Maverick Virus of the last century," since she was, in essence, a sentient version of the virus in her current form.

"To believe that you would bring something like this before us, to be here as a favor from Master X…" Kelverian shook his head. "How did you think we would allow something of this magnitude?"

"You misunderstand," Telesphoros said, calm despite the way eight pairs of eyes were now locked on him. "I know the risk that the Dark Elf presents; the effects of her abilities are still being felt outside the city. I did not mean to come here and get everyone upset with me. Rather, I came with good news, with more reason to finally have hope for this city."

Mantisk considered the Reploid for a moment, his features not hiding the fact that he was terribly upset by the idea of freeing the Dark Elf. "Please, Telesphoros, continue."

"Thankfully, the legislation regarding our careers does not limit the scope of my assignments for the scientist I work for. One of the things that I've been tasked with is research regarding Dark Elf and the project and events that created her. It is my belief that the corrupted programming that was added to her can be removed. I have my notes if the council would prefer to look over them before passing judgment in this matter. I've been working on this project for the past few years, so the methodology listed therein is highly comprehensive, and I don't foresee any issues with the procedure."

It took a moment, private communication lines opening between the Judges, before Inarabitta picked up one of the datapads on the table, handing it to Telesphoros. "Transfer your notes to that. We will look over the notes and reconvene in three day's time with our assessment and our judgment."

"Thank you," Telesphoros said, bowing after he took the datapad. Quickly linking into the machine, Telesphoros copied all of the Dark Elf notes over to the little system and handed it back. "I thank you all," he said, bowing once more, "for allowing me this session and to bring these findings to your attention." As an almost-afterthought, he uploaded the corrected coding for the power plant's systems, handing the datapad back to Inarabitta.

"Dismissed," Copy X said, getting to his feet. "We will see you in three days, Telesphoros."


	39. Haunted Memories

_Before we do anything else, we would like to apologize. Between HarunaRei's parents killing the internet with a weed whacker, work schedules, and…actually, more work schedules, this took far longer to write then we initially anticipated. As stated on my profile page, there was a last-minute idea for Chapter 39 too good to pass up. Midnyght's fiancé found an entire 55-gallon drum of High Octane Nightmare Fuel and we needed the time to spill it all over what we were writing. Add in that he works a bit of an odd shift and the end result is a slightly-delayed chapter that makes up for its tardiness with…_

_Well, we'll let you see for yourself._

* * *

><p>Fefnir counted over the units in his head as they transported in from the Trans Server and formed ranks. There were two platoons of Golems, five of Variable Pantheons, three of Flyer Pantheons, one each of Ace and Warrior Pantheons, two of Fist Pantheons, and one squad each of FJ, HR, and PZ units, making a total of 450 soldiers accompanying him.<br>There was also Hanumachine, whom he'd asked to join him on this mission, and Anubis, who he had deliberately given no instruction simply to test whether he would respond to large troop movements in his patrol area, even if they were friendly. He was inwardly grateful to not have to fight underwater, especially if what had happened to his brothers had befallen his sister as well.  
>He double-checked to ensure he was the only one with Armored Phenomenon access via the network, and then waited for Hanumachine to bring up the rear, signaling that everyone else was through.<p>

Hanumachine looked over the assembled troops, a little surprised to see the Pantheons and Golems form up near the Reploid squads that paired with their own abilities, though it really shouldn't have been as much of a shock. The Pantheons often patrolled alongside particular groups of the Generals' elite forces, so their actions now, coupled with General Fefnir's presence on this patrol, had everyone watching their step and following protocol to the letter.

With a nod to the PZs—one of the squads he'd been responsible for training, he noticed—he saluted Fefnir. "All units accounted for, sir. Trans Server has been shut down. Awaiting your orders."

Fefnir nodded his approval. "Okay, so far so good. For now were going to wait and see what Anubis is going to do about an army showing up in his territory. If I've taught him right, he'll come check things out even though he knows exactly what is happening here. If he does, we'll move forward with the plan once he arrives. I'll give him ten minutes to make some sign that he's aware of us, and after that, I'll call up Azure Falcon instead, and we'll go from there." Fefnir pulled up a satellite feed near where Anubis was currently patrolling, and did not have to wait long before he noticed Anubis' course change and he received a hail from his student.

'_General Fefnir,_' Anubis sent over the link once Fefnir had verified it, '_that is an awful lot of troops to be bringing into my patrol area. Is everything alright?_'

'_It may be a bit much,' _Fefnir replied, '_but at the same time, I want to lay siege to this base. If I wanted to just wipe out all of their forces, I would have just come here with a couple of Lieutenants and perhaps some Golems to make sure no one got away. But I want as many Resistance members taken alive as possible, even if it means bringing two soldiers for every person there just to hold them down and tie them up. I'm here for _answers,_ not bloodshed._ _I need to know how the Resistance was able to corrupt three of our Generals, or if it was even the Resistance at all. I have to find out, and for that, I need to capture as many members as possible. And just in case you were wondering, consider this your invitation. So get over here, on the double!_' That message sent, he then issued an order to the HR units to divvy up the Ace and Flyer Pantheon platoons, along with one of the Variable platoons, into groups. Once each group was settled, he ordered them to count off and had each HR group leader register as their group number. "For this mission only, when you give me your serial, replace your production number with your count off number. Hanumachine, Anubis, and I have a _lot_ of troops' movements to track, and the simpler the call signs the better. You all are going to be the scout force for this mission. I'm sending you out now, and we'll follow once you report back with your findings. Try not to attract too much attention; remember, I want a report on activity and possible strike points, not the color of their eyes and entrails. Which reminds me: if I hear so much as one shot fired without anyone firing on you, I will personally replace your buster with a watering can and send you to work on keeping the humans' gardens looking pretty. Got it?"

"What base?" Anubis said, slowing to a halt as he neared his mentor and commander. "The Resistance, if they had a base out here, hasn't made enough noise to gain the notice of my troops, sir."

Fefnir slowly turned to face his protégé, feeling a stressful tic in his right eye. "The one Phoenix and his fellow Zan'ei lieutenants have been hiding from the rest of us, not realizing that after Harpuia went _missing_ it might have been a good idea to _tell_ someone about." Now that he thought about it, he was surprised that none of the Zan'ei members had decided to reveal that information, unless they had originally come to the same conclusion that Fefnir had far sooner; this may be a trap. He decided to share this thought with Anubis, lest his apprentice feel this more of a reprimand than it was meant to be. "Granted, they may have been hiding it due to the fact that this is very likely a trap, which your observations have lent credence to that assumption, but at the same time anything would have been better than waiting for _Levi_ to get taken as well."

Anubis hung his head at that comment. "My sincerest condolences about your sister's loss, General, but as I said, there's been no indication of any operations going on in this sector past those of my troops. What coordinates were you given for the base?"

Fefnir relayed the coordinates, commenting on how the aerial scans revealed nothing at the moment, at least from a surface view. He sent a message to the scout forces, advising them to do a thermal scan before approaching too closely, and made a mental note to petition the Judges—_again_—for his own personal satellite, or at least one he and the lieutenants could share, equipped with long-range thermal and sonar capabilities.

Anubis frowned a bit once the coordinates. While not terribly familiar with the area, there was no reason to believe that he and his troops had been _that_ inept at keeping track of who or what was in the vast stretches of land that were under their supervision. "I don't know what to tell you, sir."

Fefnir rubbed his eyes with one hand. "I don't think there's anything really to say at this point, and quite frankly, I don't think I _want_ to say anything else. Since Phantom's original retirement order, I have been forced to deal with the fact that he actually is Maverick and the fact we've found this out _at the cost of my other two siblings_. I don't think I have ever been this angry for this long without having laid waste to something or someone. I _want_ the individuals responsible. It is literally consuming my thoughts." Fefnir's hands curled into tight fists, and he spoke his next words through gritted teeth. "I will make them pay. I must. It's all I have left."

Anubis struggled to keep himself from shuddering. Even through all the years of training under Fefnir's watchful eye and (usually) guiding hand, he had never seen his commander this far gone into his rage. Part of him wondered how the Guardian had enough self-control left to order the troops to keep their weapons holstered until someone decided to fire on them.

The rest of him worried that the strain of the past few weeks had broken the resilient Reploid, and the unit standing before him was more driven by the faulty logic chains that came with processor overload. If his emotional matrix hadn't been burned out by the recent events, Anubis surmised, it would be a miracle indeed.

A few tense minutes trickled by while Fefnir began to pace back and forth, awaiting a status report from the scout team. Finally, he sent a message over the wireless, asking for their ETA.

'_Approximately seven minutes, General_,' one of the units responded back a moment later.

'_Alright, your orders stand. Obtain a visual, lay down suppressive fire_ only_ if fired upon, and if you see anyone attempting to escape, _disable them_. I'll be bringing a team in behind you to set up a perimeter. General Fefnir out._'

'_Copy that, General. Forwarding standing orders to the rest of the recon teams,_' the HR unit sent back. '_Over and out._'

Fefnir whistled sharply and swept one hand upward in a sign that the FJ units immediately recognized, falling in line near their commanding officer. "We're moving out! Take the Golems and Warriors and half the remaining Variables! Split 'em up and count 'em off, same as the scouts! PZs, you've got the Fists and the rest of the Variables! You'll be the infiltration team, headed by Hanumachine and Anubis! Count 'em off, same as the rest, five teams under Anubis, five under Hanumachine! You don't move until perimeter's been set! Understood?"

A chorus of "Sir, yes, sir!" rang out across the sands.

Fefnir looked over his troops, and once they had formed rank, he called out, "Evens on my right, odds on my left, lows in front, highs in back, five and six at my side! _March_!"

Anubis nodded a bit to himself as the five PZ units linked to him with their report numbers, frowning a bit and directing the sixth unit that contacted him to report to Hanumachine. Looking at the units his commander was moving with, he held himself back from shaking his head.

"You should have more faith in General Fefnir, Anubis. Despite all that he is going through and how much this must be hurting him, you cannot let yourself doubt his motives or his mind." Hanumachine looked up to the lupine Reploid, setting his staff into the sand as he watched Fefnir move toward this supposed base.

Anubis sighed, running his thumb across the orb settled at the top of his own staff. "You are so assured of this that you would advise me as such," and amber eyes settled on the simian unit. "I am left wondering—could you follow the same advice yourself?"

The Zan'ei lieutenant blinked, turning his gaze to the unit at his side for only a moment before answering. "Yes. Yes, Anubis, I could." _And I do._

* * *

><p>As Copy X moved to the Council Chamber, he was a bit surprised to find Telesphoros already waiting, sitting quietly on one of the seats outside of the room. "They haven't started yet?" he asked.<p>

"From what I've seen since I arrived here," Telesphoros said, "Judges Schilt and Mantisk still haven't arrived, and Judge Biblio stepped out about four minutes ago."

Copy X dropped into the seat next to the unit. "What are you looking over?" He hadn't missed the flicker on the visor, indicating that the Reploid was using the internal screen.

"Just the information I provided regarding Dark Elf. I've been going over it for the past few days, making sure that I didn't miss anything. I'd hate for them to look over those notes, see what I've theorized, and find out that there was something I forgot to include." Telesphoros leaned back, pulling the visor up once he'd switched it off, blue eyes turning to Copy X. "Have you had a chance to look over it?"

"I took some time, yes," Copy X admitted, "though some of it was a bit over my head. Coding and things like you detailed in that report aren't exactly my…thing."

"It's alright. As far as I figured, the Judges had some of the tech crews going over the details," which was why the report was a factual analysis instead of a fabricated pile of junk data. "I wouldn't expect anyone to take what I said and offered at face value. That they gave me just three days instead of longer meant a lot," especially with the size of his notes file.

"After all the time we've spent dealing with this city in the state it's in," Copy X said, "it doesn't surprise me that this got prioritized."

Telesphoros nodded. "I can't say that I blame you, especially with the situation you've found yourself in. So young and yet made to carry so much. I'm surprised you haven't broken, or worse."

Copy X was careful to keep his voice low. "I fail to see how this could have been worse. I certainly didn't have the knowledge I needed to keep this city from falling further apart."

Telesphoros shook his head. "It could have been worse had you been found out."

Crimson eyes widened a bit, but Copy X couldn't help but nod in agreement. "That the act has gone on this long still surprises me."

"In a way, you are fortunate that the citizens pushed the true master of the city away. Locked away in this tower, you have been able to do what you can while they cling to an ideal, unknowing and uncaring about who you are or aren't," though there was an undertone of something in his voice that Copy X didn't catch.

Childre poked his head out of the Council chamber, looking at the two figures sitting in the chairs against the opposite wall. "Master X, Telesphoros, if you would join us please?"

Both units got to their feet, Copy X moving a bit ahead of the scientist, and they moved into the room. "The entire Council is not present," Copy X noted.

"Volteel stepped out to see if Deathtanz and Hellbat aren't still bickering over the analysis reports we got back last night from Engineering and Programming," Childre returned. "Honestly, neither of them have much experience with the kind of work you do, so for them to be this caught up in arguing the finer points of your notes leaves me wondering if they're doing just because they're _normally_ on opposite sides of a case decision."

Telesphoros looked a little crestfallen at that. "There's division in the case already?"

Childre took his seat at the table, shaking his head. "We will discuss this once the Council has convened."

Copy X rested a hand against Telesphoros' arm. "Don't fret too much. What you're doing will be more important to them than some petty differences. It wouldn't be the first time they've put their arguments aside for the sake of the city." Even if the last unanimous vote had loosed a Maverick upon their ranks.

Telesphoros nodded. "Thank you for the reassurances, Master X."

A few moments after Copy X had settled into his seat, the door opened again, Volteel shaking his head as he stepped into the room. "Forgive the delay," he said, bowing to Copy X, "but Judges Mantisk and Schilt will be here shortly." He could only hope beyond reason that they'd stop the running argument they were engaged in by the time they walked in the door.

"I'm not saying that it's not factually based, nor am I saying the idea is without merit," Deathtanz said as he walked in a few minutes later, looking to Hellbat. "All I'm concerned about is the risks associated with keeping her contained while in transit and during the procedure."

"And there's more than enough supplied in the case notes," Hellbat fired back, "that indicates the mobile containment field will work. Hell, we had the entire Engineering department build test units just _because_ you're this paranoid. I thought you'd let it drop once that was done." Pulling his coattails clear of the chair, Judge Schilt took his seat.

"It's not paranoia when I'm trying to ensure the safety of our citizens," Mantisk said, taking his seat. "I may not have been active during the Elf Wars, but that says nothing of what the history files say and show of those terrible four years. That Master X," and the Judge paused here, bowing his head in respect to the head of the city, "has trusted Telesphoros with this kind of project only tells me that he believes in the scientist. I'd rather be safe and test out what has been presented than go on the blind faith of theory."

"Regardless," and Judge Schilt tapped his fingers against the table, "we have a case before us and the petitioner's been waiting, listening to us talk as if he's not here. Good afternoon, Telesphoros."

"Good afternoon, Judge Schilt," Telesphoros returned, "Master X, honored Judges of Neo Arcadia," and he bowed to them.

"Forgive my disregard for your presence," Judge Mantisk said. "You must understand that I value the security of our people above the performance level of the power plant. I wanted to be sure that your theories and data were accurate."

"And I hope that my notes have provided you the assurances you need."

Mantisk simply looked at the Reploid, choosing not to answer.

"The case you've brought before us is an unexpected and a bit worrisome," Judge Kelverian began, eyes turning to the Reploid standing in the center of the room. "For over a decade now, we have seen much in terms of issues with the city. So many of our core systems, things essential to the continued health and safety of the citizens, have become strained, have started to fail. Here, finally, one of our own has brought us something that can convince us that there is still hope, not only to correct the city's power supply, but also to purge the Dark Elf of her taint."

"That being said," Foxtar noted, "part of our deliberations included the necessity of an agreement that Dark Elf, once restored to her original self, would not immediately be contained to the city's power grid."

"Part of the threat of Dark Elf's power is not that she is, by herself, an entity to be feared, but rather that she is at the core of the current Maverick crisis," Kelverian said, a slight tic evident as he picked up from Foxtar's point. "As it stands, the last thirty years have seen a new breed of Maverick active, one that not only threatens what remains of this world but may very well be responsible for the loss of three of our Guardians. For an infected unit to be able to pass the new generation of virus, bypass the protections on known immune units, means that we cannot idly accept any offer that could further risk this city and her people. As such, we have deliberated and reviewed this case in great detail." Kelverian looked to Mantisk then.

"In the past three days, several variations of your suggested mobile containment unit were designed, not only the model you noted, but variants of it assembled by some of the best and brightest of both human and Reploid staff." Mantisk set his hands on the table, taking a deep breath. "All of the units are fully operational and are awaiting your analysis." The Judge paused for only a moment. "You have my support for the purging of the Dark Elf programming."

"As I stated earlier, the only way we would allow the removal of Dark Elf from her current containment is with the understanding that she is not to be used for the power plant until we have verified that the Maverick crisis has been ended. For too long we have been sending out our units, both Pantheon and Reploid, and it has detracted heavily from all efforts to repair and reclaim the planet outside of the Eden Dome." Foxtar looked down to the datapad on the table in front of him, tapping a few things. "Global reclamation efforts, biodome construction, terraforming projects, everything that we were doing to give our races places where they could grow and flourish was stopped in its tracks. Entire fleets of units were recalled to Neo Arcadia as a preemptive defensive maneuver. Remote scans and probes to areas that we were working in show that all the projects have since become lost causes, overrun by Mavericks and the degradation caused by the current environment of the planet. If we are to save this city, we need to save all that was meant to help her thrive."

"I understand," Telesphoros said. "My concern with this now is how you plan to use her."

"As she was before the Elf Wars," Flizard said, an edge of frustration in his voice. "She is coherent, or was said to be such, in all the data files regarding her existence prior to her conversion. We will assign her to a military guard unit comprised of some of the senior officers, dispatch them in areas of high Maverick activity, and do what needs to be done to put an end to this."

"And what if she flees? At the end of the Elf Wars, it is said that she fled from the battlefield, abandoning the unit Omega and leaving all of the units afflicted by her condition."

"You did state in your notes that a second containment unit can be built wherein she can affect the world around her, utilize her curative nature, without risking a breach of the cage holding her." Volteel tapped his own datapad, offering it to Telesphoros.

"I know the section of the notes you're referring to, but I also made a comment there that I was unsure if the containment unit would actually be able to hold her for an indefinite period of time. It's why we had to redesign the way her capacitor containment unit was built." Telesphoros did take the datapad then, selecting another section of notes. "There," he said.

"Would you be able to come up with a functioning unit that would allow her to work as an anti-virus again, the way she was originally meant to?" Foxtar asked. "If not, you must understand that we have no choice but to allow her outside of any containing device in order to end this issue."

"Of course I understand," Telesphoros said with a nod. "My director and I will need time to go over the schematics, but, at worst, I would say there would be a delay of…perhaps a month, maybe two? It's simply a matter of seeing how she behaves and reacts once purged and adapting the new system to that. I hope that is not asking too much."

"No, that seems reasonable," Inarabitta said.

"We'll expect weekly progress reports regarding your work," Flizard cut in. "I'd rather not find out a month after the fact that you lost her trying to fix her."

"That kind of attitude is uncalled for, Flizard," le Cactank admonished.

"Regardless of everyone else's views on several matters that have come before the Council in recent years and this idea that I'm apathetic towards anything that doesn't affect me directly," Flizard snapped back, "I don't want to find out that something _else_ went wrong in the city and we only find out well after the fact. It's already happened, already weakened our city further. No. And you know what? Not only will I only allow this on the stipulation of weekly progress reports, I'm demanding a unanimous vote. Something of this magnitude cannot idly be passed by majority."

"Telesphoros," Kelverian asked, looking to the unit, "your thoughts?"

"I am honestly a bit surprised that the requirement isn't _daily_ progress reports, all things considered," he answered. "Things being as they are, however, I'm willing to submit to the Council's decision and hold to whatever requirements are put forth."

Flizard smirked. "See? I do not ask too much," and a glare was thrown at le Cactank.

"It was not the stipulation that caused me to speak as I did," and Glacier waved his hand, effectively ending the line of conversation before it turned into another argument with the temperamental Judge.

"You mentioned daily reports," Volteel said. "Do you think that level of detail would be required?"

"As I said, with my subject of study being the Dark Elf, it does shock me a bit that daily would not be the first suggestion," and here, Telesphoros shrugged. "Maybe a middle ground between what I presumed and Judge Flizard's suggestion would work well? A report due in to the Council every three days, perhaps?"

Flizard was silent for a moment, considering Telesphoros' suggestion, then nodded. "With the understanding that any sudden changes in the case are to reported immediately."

"That's a given in any line of work," the blonde replied.

"Any other points of concern?" Copy X asked, leaning back in his seat.

Foxtar moved a bit in his seat, looking to Copy X. "You have remained rather silent during this entire exchange, Master X. Is there anything that you'd like to present to the Council?"

Copy X shrugged. "As I said, Telesphoros was part of the team that worked to seal her four years ago. I know what his skillset is like when it comes to working with the containment systems. I also know that he's had the last four years to work on the theories and means of purging Dark Elf. Everything he's presented so far for this case has met not only with our approval after review, but also the verification of several of our research divisions. I personally see nothing wrong with his assessment and feel that we should push forward. The only detail I feel needs to be brought up is the safety of our city should the worst happen."

"What do you mean?" Glacier asked.

"Simply put, we need the military set to respond in the unlikely event that Dark Elf manages to get free before she is purged," and Copy X shrugged a bit. "I would rather us be prepared for the worst than to blindly trust in luck and technical know-how. No offense, Telesphoros."

"None taken, Master X," the blonde responded. "Better to be ready for something than to be caught unawares. Certainly the last thing this city needs is a resurgence of infected or another war."

"That is true," Biblio nodded. "We still have the procedural data from Dark Elf's original retrieval. Should we have someone start passing the data around to the troops?"

"The data would have to be reviewed," Schilt cut in. "Considering that it's been four years since the retrieval occurred, we should verify that the procedural data is still viable."

"I'll forward the data to Guardian Fefnir after our meeting adjourns," Copy X said.

"Speaking of the original retrieval," Glacier said, looking to Copy X, "why is it that we've never been provided data regarding where Dark Elf is being held?"

"A matter of security," Copy X said. "Even with the Council held to standards of silence, even though I know I can trust that things said within this chamber aren't just idly spoken off outside of this room, Dark Elf is a major threat to our city. To divulge the location of her prison is not a risk I want to take."

"Really," Flizard said, leaning forward a bit, "why would you even bring that up at a time like this, le Cactank? We've had four years for the question to come up in session."

"And this is the first time it's been relevant," Glacier fired back.

"I think it's pointless," Flizard shot back.

"You think much of our dealings are useless," Volteel said with a frown.

Flizard leaned back into his chair, glaring at the other Judges. "Think what you will. I'm done arguing about it. We have more important matters to attend to here, as I'm certain there are other stipulations that haven't yet been brought up."

"Something else?" Mantisk asked.

"Yes, actually. If we're going to be concerned about the state of the city and the Dark Elf being unbound from whatever cage Master X and Telesphoros put her into, I say we should divert a few of the Neo Arcadian Tower staff to Telesphoros' lab. Assistance and overview, since purging Dark Elf will be quite the learning experience." Flizard looked to the scientist. "Your thoughts?"

"If you have a team or want to suggest one, I don't see a reason to argue. I don't, however, intend to do anything with the Dark Elf until I've had a chance to look over the containment units that have been built and see what of the modifications may prove beneficial." Telesphoros motioned with his hands that it was really up to the Judges at this point.

"Any other questions or concerns?" Copy X asked.

"Just one," Inarabitta said, offering his datapad to Telesphoros. "I understand that it's been four years since your initial work with Dark Elf and that you've had a wealth of time to devote to this project."

"And your reasoning for bringing this up?" Telesphoros asked as he took the datapad, noticing the highlighted field in the file folder. "Oh. That."

"Some of those files date almost as far back as the sealing," Inarabitta noted, "yet this is the first time you've come forward with the data. I don't mean to question your intentions, but it seems…odd that you've got such dated files."

Telesphoros nodded. "Some of the files _were_ from that far back. Work like this doesn't just come together in a matter of weeks, or even months, especially when you have to consider the inherent danger of anyone other than a known immune working in close proximity. Add in the fact that it seems that the current version of the Maverick plague is bypassing immune unit's protections?"

"No, that's understandable. Highly so," Inarabitta returned. "I'm just surprised you didn't bring this to our attention sooner. If you'd been working with the team, with scientists and programmers here at the Tower, it may not have taken as long."

Telesphoros smirked a bit, almost chuckling. "Despite my acceptance of the terms that I have an observation team with me, I prefer working alone or assisting my lab director. The quiet helps me think."

Kelverian nodded, a small smile playing across his face. "I can understand that concept," he agreed.

"So," Volteel began once Telesphoros handed the datapad back, "you are in agreement and will comply with all the terms laid out during this meeting?"

"More than happy to oblige," the unit responded. "If you'd like to forward me a formalized document for me to sign off on, I'll do that as well."

"We'll pass that along once it's drafted," Foxtar assured. "Now, you did say you wanted to look over the containment units that Engineering put together, so once we finalize the vote," which he had no doubt would be unanimous, as Flizard had demanded, "Judge Mantisk will escort you to the labs."

"Let's begin the vote, then, shall we?" Copy X said. "Foxtar?"

"I'm in favor," Foxtar replied.

"In favor," Inarabitta echoed.

"In favor, and thank you for coming forward, Telesphoros," Volteel said.

One by one, each Judge voted on the project, and Telesphoros bowed deeply the moment Judge Schilt provided the unifying vote.

"Thank you for this opportunity," he said, still bowing.

"Thank you for providing us this glimmer of hope," Mantisk returned, getting to his feet.

"Session adjourned," Copy X said. "And I wish you well, Telesphoros."

* * *

><p>'<em>General Fefnir, what's your ETA?<em>'

'_I've got the base and scout team on my long-range scanners, so I should be there and setting up the perimeter in less than two minutes._' He paused to consider for a moment, then sent over the link with Hanumachine and Anubis, '_Go ahead and start moving out. I should have the perimeter mostly set up by the time your teams arrive._' He then switched back to the lead scout team, '_HR-01, have you gotten visual on any base activity?_'

'_Negative, General,_' the aerial unit replied. '_It's as dead out here as Lieutenant Flauclaws' sense of humor._'

Fefnir couldn't help but smirk, though he still chided the Rekku unit over the line, '_Careful. He might hear you. Regardless, I've got the base in visual range now,_' and his comm linked to all ten of the scout team leaders. '_Teams Four through Ten, set up side and rear perimeter. My teams are inbound, visual contact confirmed. Teams One through Three, hold position until further notice._'

Wordlessly, Anubis and Hanumachine signaled their units, moving out for the base, and the Jin'en lieutenant could only hope that however this turned out, for good or ill, that Fefnir would be able to walk away from it and remain sane.

Even if the unit did seem to skirt that line on a daily basis.

As Fefnir continued to set up the perimeter, he couldn't help but notice that there was a distinct lack of recent activity around the surface level of the facility. Tracks obviously would not last very long in the desert environment, but a cursory thermographic scan revealed that the internal environment was not markedly different compared to the surrounding area. Granted, it was slightly cooler, but that could be explained by the facility being underground and out of direct sunlight.

He began to worry that even if the intel was spot-on, they may simply have been too late. "Please," he said to himself, under his breath, "let them still be here." It not being a trap would help, too.

'_General, infiltration team is four minutes out,_' Hanumachine relayed a few moments later, just as Fefnir was verifying with his own troops that the perimeter had been secured.

'_Great. I want you to begin infiltration immediately upon arrival. Anubis, you'll be circling around to one of the rear entrances._'

The lieutenants cast questioning looks at each other before Anubis responded, '_How many entrances_ are _there?_'

'_Scouting team reported five total,_' not counting the possibility that there was a Trans Server somewhere within the complex proper. '_Although, the two in back are close enough that they probably lead to the same area._'

"So," Hanumachine noted, looking to Anubis, "there are really only four ways in."

The jackal-headed unit nodded. "Perhaps three on each of us and secondary teams of two to the other entrances?"

"In the event that we're dealing with an active base," Hanumachine corrected, "it'd be best if the secondary teams were three and ours only two," and he linked to his teams. '_PZ-01, 05, and 09, squad up. Once we reach this facility, you're heading down through the second of the front entry points. PZ-01, you're in lead. PZ-03 and 07, you're on me._'

Similar orders were passed along to Anubis' assigned teams, and the infiltration teams moved into position within moments of arriving at the facility. Anubis' gaze was turned to the dilapidated and crumbling buildings that dotted the surface of this area, wondering what, if anything at all, was waiting for them beneath the sands. '_We're ready to move in, General._'

Fefnir nodded to himself. '_Good. Then do so. Considering what we've seen so far, I don't expect there to be very much resistance at first. With that in mind, I want you to keep an eye out for any secondary passages or anything that looks out of place._'

'_Understood, General,_' Hanumachine cut in, '_but the PZ units are trained for infiltration as part of their enlistment within this division. We're well-versed in operations such as this._'

It was a moment before Anubis piped up, his voice having dropped a little as he admitted, '_I'm not._'

Fefnir's frustration was evident in his reply. '_It may be obvious to _you_, but for myself and my lieutenant, we specialize in blowing shit up, _sometimes_ from a safe distance. So, yes, Anubis has the PZ units with him, but it would still be,_' and Fefnir paused for a moment, his temper flaring further, 'nice_ if Anubis had even the faintest idea what to look for,_' especially considering that he'd _missed_ this base _several times over_.

If it even was one, anyway.

With the Jin'en General unable to see him from where they were positioned, Hanumachine sighed heavily and shook his head, a series of signals given to the units behind him. In quick succession, they moved for the entryways, dropping down silently into the network of tunnels.

It was times like these where being able to see in complete darkness proved so very useful. Optics switched over as they moved deeper into the facility, only the occasional click of metal on metal giving away the positioning of the team.

Anubis' mouth curled into a scowl as he and his team entered the facility, surprised—though still able to see—that, aside from the light streaming in from the occasional hole in the ceiling, there wasn't even ambient lighting here. Either this really was just a false location provided by a General gone Maverick, or the Resistance was lying in wait.

Were it not for the number of units around him, the Jin'en unit would have engaged his proximity sensors just to have some hope of warning before he got jumped.

Slowly, reports started coming in from the other groups—the first sub-level was empty.

After they reached the second sub-level of the facility, Hanumachine looked back to the units with him. "Variable units, engage your stun rods, let's see what some light does down here."

Little by little, the soft glow emitted from the weapon rods started providing a better view than their initial optical setting had allowed for, and the former Zan'ei lieutenant sagged a bit where he stood. This base wasn't just empty on the second level; it looked like there hadn't been any major activity here in _decades_. Still, it could prove a ruse, something to lower their guard.

Slowing their advance, the team moved forward, searching the rooms and checking anything that looked like it could have been a doorway or access hatch.

Anubis' hand tightened around his staff as he neared the ladder that would lead down to the second sub-level, waiting for a moment before he dropped down and quickly moved out of the way to allow the rest of the squad to follow. '_Anything?_' he asked over his link with Hanumachine.

'_Nothing so far,_' the simian unit responded back, a bit of frustration evident in his voice at the unit's inability to remain quiet over wireless. It was now more than obvious that Anubis had _no_ formal training in stealth infiltration. '_Although, it might be a good idea to use the Variable's stun rods for light. I'm seeing a lot more that my optics weren't picking up in the dark._'

Orders were relayed with the other groups, little flickers of light moving through the massive underground facility. '_This place looks like a crypt,_' Anubis noted.

'_Indeed it does,_' Hanumachine agreed. '_Moving for the third level now._'

'_I should be following in a few moments._'

Scouts from PZ-01's and PZ-04's teams rendezvoused with Hanumachine a moment later, relaying that that the teams had cleared their areas and were heading down to the third level.

'_I don't like the looks of this,_' Anubis sent as he dropped down to the next floor. '_I'm starting to believe General Phantom provided bogus coordinates._'

'_Phoenix and I both warned General Fefnir of this,_' and the unit looked toward the ceiling then. '_He will not respond well if we find that this was no more than a ruse._'

Turning around as a light neared him, Anubis nodded to Hanumachine. "I fear that the anger he's been holding in will become too much, but we cannot tell him that we found something when there is nothing but dust and silence here."

The unit nodded. "It would likely be best to get the troops out before we report to him, then. He needs to blow off steam, to let that anger out before he takes it out on his troops, on our people. He is strong-willed, but to have lost so much in just a few weeks has to be taking more of a toll on him than he is allowing us to see." Hanumachine stopped for a moment, then looked up to Anubis. "Just for future reference, unless you're running a secured and _hidden_ comm line, don't contact someone else over local wireless. It risks giving your position away and warning your enemy of your presence."

Anubis' jaw clenched, nodding at the advice, even if he didn't vocalize his understanding. "He despises his emotional programming on the field, of that I am certain." Looking over his shoulder, his gaze drifted over the gathered troops. "If this is a ruse, if the Resistance is not here, then what?"

"Orbital scans, I suppose. Search for other facilities that appear dead on the surface. Send in small teams for recon, perhaps no more than three or four of the Zan'ei. His strike force for this far exceeds any military protocol ever put into place by the city, and I do not want to imagine what the Judges will say of him when this is brought to their attention," since their numbers were not so easily ignored, not when two-thirds of the force he brought weren't cleared for reactivation yet, not with their response protocols still in review.

Only the Pantheons and Golems stationed in Neo Arcadia Tower had been cleared for duty, and all of those had been left behind to keep guard over the tower or mobilize with the various patrols.

* * *

><p>For the third time since the infiltration teams began their descent, Fefnir was forced to physically remind himself that this was now a <em>stealth<em> operation, bringing one hand up to the earcone on his helmet and slowly clenching it into a fist before letting it fall to his side again. This time, however, his hand grazed against the kunai secured to his leg, his only memento of his youngest brother. Pulling the blade from its sheath, he contemplated the weapon at length, turning it over in his hands several times. _You were always the patient one, little bro_, he thought. _Heck, I don't think you ever batted an eye when I called you 'runt'_, nothing ever seemed to faze the unit.

Several of his memories with the youngest of the AXRs rolled through his processor, a wave of nearly painful nostalgia stirred up as he recalled the unit's earliest attempts at 'stealth' attacks from the hallway ceilings of Neo Arcadia Tower. _Banzai_, he thought to himself, sheathing the kunai and walking over to the shadows reaching out from what was left of one of the buildings. _Alright, little brother, let's see how _you_ handle things_, and he lowered himself to the ground, settling back against his ankles, imitating the way he'd often found Phantom when the unit was on standby, waiting for orders from their father.

His chronometer placed him at a minute-six before he noticed he was drumming his fingers against one of his thighs.

* * *

><p>It didn't take long for the teams to descend the full seven levels, each floor the same empty, quiet desolation and lack of use, and it was evident in their communications that neither lieutenant was looking forward to relaying this data back to Fefnir.<p>

Moving through the last few rooms, Anubis felt the worry gnaw at him all the more, and he'd turned to start heading back for the surface when one of the Zan'ei stopped him.

"Lieutenant, over here," and they kicked at a spot on the floor.

"What am I supposed to be seeing?"

"Not seeing," and the unit tapped his booted foot against the floor. "Hearing. The panel here, it sounds like the space beneath it is hollow."

Anubis leaned over, looking at the section of floor, though he could see no visible break in the metal. Tapping against the spot the unit had pointed out, he frowned, then looked to Hanumachine. "What do you think?"

The Zan'ei Lieutenant moved to the spot on the floor, tapping it with his staff, then tapping another point on the floor a meter or so away. "There's definitely something down there," and he pondered the nondescript floor panel, "though I doubt we will find anything more there than we have in the visible levels of the facility." Really, calling it a base was a moot point by now.

"So, how do we get this open?" Anubis asked. "There's no release, no break in the panel, nothing to indicate it actually opens here." His gaze lifted. "Perhaps there's an access panel nearby, something of a release mechanism?"

"It would need power," one of the PZ units piped up. "If it works like any other door or hatch, and nothing in this facility seems to be running anymore," so much so that even auxiliary power seemed to have run out.

Hanumachine frowned slightly, then signaled to three of the Zan'ei. "Controlled ultrasonic," he ordered. "Scan the room. Mark minus five."

The units complied, setting their boosters to secondary configuration as they planted their feet against the floor, and an ultrasonic ping fired from their boots, the resulting image from the three units showing that yes, the panel did, in fact, have a means by which to withdraw. Looking at the provided image, Hanumachine followed the tangle of wires from the gears hidden beneath the floor to a spot on the wall.

"The control console?" Anubis asked, having looked over the scans as well. "If we can get that open, we should be able to hotwire it."

"We don't have a portable charge tank," Hanumachine said, an eyebrow rising in question.

Anubis waved his staff toward one of the groups of Pantheon Variables. "No, but we have them. One of their stun rods should suffice."

Another of the PZ units looked to the Pantheons, then to the hidden box on the wall. "Won't the resulting power backlash from a direct interface like that short out the unit's processor?"

Anubis considered the PZ's comment for a moment before nodding. "Unfortunately, it's likely that the Pantheon will not survive the procedure," and the grip on his staff tightened. "Under General Fefnir's command, you quickly learn that, albeit controlled by necessity, sacrifices are required by our military when the situation in the field calls for it." His gaze narrowed as he turned to the PZ unit then, "Why, are you _worried_? Far be it for me to judge one not normally under my command, but you border on being labeled Maverick for an emotional response towards a simple _Pantheon_."

The PZ unit's eyes widened, fumbling over her words for a moment before falling silent.

Hanumachine stepped between the PZ and Anubis, worry reflected in his gaze. "I would not be so quick to judge a unit based on merit of words alone," he said. "You are not skilled in the art of hearing what is beneath the spoken word, are you? That was not an emotional response."

Anubis flinched as though he'd been slapped, turning his derisive glare on his fellow Lieutenant. "If not an emotional response, then what?" and it was clear that Anubis wanting nothing to do with this game of the mind being played by the members of the intelligence division.

"After the mass retirements of our Pantheon and Golem forces in the wake of the progenitor's disappearance, do you think we can so idly toss aside Neo Arcadian resources?" Hanumachine looked to one of the Pantheons, the unit obeying the command passed over local wireless, moving for the panel in the wall.

Considering the wall for a moment, the red optic narrowing slightly as it verified a target lock on the console beneath the metal plating, the Pantheon lifted its arm, the stun rod igniting just before it impacted against the terminal, a loud pop sounding in the small room as the electrical surge coursed through the control mechanism, the floor panel dropping a few millimeters before retracting. The panel had only moved about halfway into its recess before a second pop was heard, followed by a louder crack and a sizzling sound, the Pantheon falling to the floor, its optics suite having exploded from the inside out, a thin wisp of smoke snaking upward from the gaping hole.

Hanumachine watched the unit fall to the floor, silent as he walked back to the half-opened panel and looked down the darkened passageway. "There," he said to Anubis, his own gaze narrowed in frustration with the Jin'en unit, "is that enough of a _sacrifice_ for you, or should we idly throw away another of our city's remaining units to open it the _rest of the way_?" and he planted his staff against the panel and forced it the rest of the way, dropping soundlessly to the floor some distance below.

One by one, the remaining units dropped through the hatchway, the light from the Pantheon's stun rods faintly illuminating the wide space.

"Fan out," Hanumachine instructed the Pantheons, the glow spreading and shedding some light on the area beneath the base proper.

As the Pantheons moved further out, broadening the spill of light from their stun rods, a few tattered remains of old vehicles came into sight: a couple dilapidated Chasers, a few more transport vehicles in similar condition, and varied scraps of old tech that had long ago fallen to ruin.

Anubis looked across the space, his scowl deepening at the sight revealed by the soft yellow glow. "We found a parking garage," he said to Hanumachine. "Guardian Phantom lied to us."

"We did not expect much else when it was revealed that he had gone Maverick," Hanumachine replied. "We warned Fefnir several times over that it was either a ruse or a trap, but better to know than to remain in the city as if our forces have not been so severely debilitated."

"Sirs!" one of the PZ units called out, and it only took a moment for the Lieutenants to pinpoint which unit had spoken, his voice having echoed slightly, and they moved across the large room.

Hanumachine looked at what lay near the PZ's feet, his features tightening a little at the state of the Reploid on the floor. Several of its internal mechanisms were exposed to the elements, some of the plating and skeletal structure showing signs of aging, tinted red with the first signs of rust. One arm had fallen completely off, and the other was faring little better, still attached below the elbow by only a handful of tubes and cables, though both legs were still relatively whole.

Really, the only damage was that there were such large portions of the synthetic dermal layer missing.

"Perhaps we found an old base, one they'd abandoned years ago?" the PZ suggested.

Hanumachine shrugged. "Without an idea of how long the Resistance has been in operation," and that none of the city's information team could actually pinpoint when the radical organization has actually been started was a rather large embarrassment on their part, "I can't say."

Anubis tilted his head, considering the damaged unit, before turning and looking to one of the nearby Pantheons, the unit nodding as its optical sensor refocused. "You may not be able to," Anubis said, his voice a bit low, "but I will certainly do what I can to find out."

Hanumachine couldn't help but curl up a little on himself at the Jin'en's words.

The title appended to his name had been given for a _reason_.

It was a few moments before the Pantheon returned, the body of its fallen comrade slung over its shoulders, and the unit that had been used to power the hatch's release mechanism was dropped to the floor next to the corroded remains that had been found.

"Lieutenant Hanumachine?" the PZ unit asked, confused and worried about what was going on.

The simian unit simply shook his head, signaling for the unit to leave the area. This was not something a unit needed to see in practice.

Pressing his hand against the retired Pantheon's chest for a moment, Anubis pulled the arm back, the narrow points of his fingers driving effortlessly through the Variable's chest plate, hand curling around the recently-fallen unit's core before twisting and yanking the power cell clear of the unit. Looking to the Reploid 'heart' in his hands, Anubis was quick to summon a pair of Cyber Elves from the containment unit on his arm, the little ones looking tired and rather sickly.

At this, Hanumachine turned his back on what the jackal-headed unit was about to do.

Setting his staff on the ground, Anubis reached in and pulled the defunct core from the unit they'd found in the lower levels, tossing it aside before pressing the Pantheon's core into the hollow space. At the Lieutenant's silent command, the Cyber Elves moved closer and lent what little energy they had to repairing the connections between the core and the long-dead Reploid's systems, disappearing with soft cries as they burned out the last of their core crystals' energy.

With a horrid groan as systems that had been shut down for an unknown number of years came back online, the Reploid's frame shuddered, optics snapping online, and under the sharp glare of the nearby Pantheon's stun rod, it was clear that only one of the optics was booting properly.

"Can you speak?" Anubis asked, waiting for a response as the unit attempted to push itself—with the level of breakdown, it was impossible to determine apparent gender—into a sitting position, and the one functioning optic turned to the arm that wasn't registering. Its mouth opened, but the sound that came out was similar to a pile of gravel being tossed around a metal barrel.

Anubis pressed a hand to the unit's forehead, forcing its gaze to meet his, and he opened a wireless channel with it. "What is this place?"

The one functioning eye slid out of focus as its frame shuddered, and it turned, quite jerkily, to look around the room they were in. '_My…work,_' it replied after a moment, the voice over the link grainy, barely comprehensible underneath the static, stuttering as the unit attempted to string together partial sentences.

"And what was your work?"

'_We…study…program._'

"Reploid programs? Or mechaniloid?"

Another attempt was made to speak, a soft spark coming from the unit's throat as the vocal processor shorted out.

"Don't try to talk," he instructed the unit, and its head twitched a few times as it looked around the room again, its gaze stopping this time on the nearby Variable.

The next batch of words across the communication link was little more than a wave of gibberish, and the Reploid's entire frame shuddered, something else in its internal structure fizzling.

Anubis pulled another Repair Nurse Elf from the containment unit, the little one dissipating as had the two that had come before, and the Reploid's shaking settled some. "Now, focus. What were you doing here?"

'_New protections…healer elves… Mavericks…before they overrun…western Eurasian terraforming,_' it replied.

Anubis was able to restrain himself from any overt physical display of his frustration, the hand that curled around his staff clenching tightly as he pushed himself to his feet. "We should return topside," he managed after a long moment of silence, turning away from the unit still prone on the floor.

"And what of this…" and the unit motioned to the Reploid whose singular functioning eye was trained on Anubis, "this unit? Did it provide any relevant data?"

"Only that this facility was not tied to the Resistance," and there was a snarl in the lupine unit's voice. "The facility, this place, dedicated to Cyber Elf research from the _start_ of the current Maverick scourge. It is useless to us, pointless for us to linger," and Anubis turned to leave.

"And you will leave this one to suffer on as such until its core shuts down?" Hanumachine could not understand how the lieutenant could be so needlessly _callous_. "The dead should be allowed to rest in peace."

"Does ignorance of the emotional locks run so rampant in Guardian Phantom's forces?" Anubis asked, turning and standing at his full height, nearly double that of Hanumachine. "Let it die."

"I cannot help but be disgusted by your display. Horrid enough to see the Zombies under your command, the Scrap Elves you claim to care for used as nothing more than fuel for your legion, but this? It was Reploid once." Hanumachine looked down to the unit, disturbed and sickened as that single optic turned to it. "You would not have done this to any of our own, reanimated them for them to die anew."

"You find me to be so sickening, yet never have you spoken like this of the Mavericks, and they are little but hollow shells puppeteered by the virus."

"The virus cannot bring the dead back, it simply kills the living mind," Hanumachine fired back.

Another snort, and Anubis slammed the butt of his staff into the unit's torso, smashing its core. "I would suggest you try _very hard_ to hide your reactions before the Judges think you as Maverick as your former commander."

* * *

><p>Fefnir saw the first of the units making their way out of the complex, immediately aware that something was wrong by the distinct lack of prisoners following them out. His patience was a frayed, raw end, and he turned his considerable fury on the first PZ unit to exit the building. "Well?! Did you manage to capture everyone with that little trouble?!" He grabbed the terrified unit by the collar, hoisting him into the air. "<em>Answer me, damn it! <em>Where is the Resistance?! _What's going on down there?!_"

The PZ unit stammered out a terrified response. "G-General Fefnir, sir, I regret to inform you that…" He paused for a moment, visibly trembling in the Guardian's grip, resuming only after Fefnir gave him a shake. "We…we did not find any sign of the Resistance here. The facility has been abandoned for decades."

The sole remaining Guardian of the grand city of Neo Arcadia thought he heard a snapping sound somewhere in his head.

The unit in the red Reploid's grip was flung to the ground with such force that the back of his helmet cracked, the impact leaving him an unconscious heap at Fefnir's feet.

Fefnir violently kicked the PZ aside and opened a link with his lieutenant. 'Anubis! _Get your sorry undead carcass up here, _pronto_!_'

The unit's head snapped to the side as Fefnir's voice roared across the link, and he hoisted himself the last few feet up to the second level. '_I'm two levels down, sir, and should be topside in less than a minute,_' and he started moving just a bit faster at that, '_although I'm afraid that the report isn't going to be good._'

Fefnir's voice exploded once again over the comm, '_You're damn right it's not good! Just get up here!_' Fefnir tried to remember the last time he was this upset that something had gone awry.

He was having a hard time thinking of one.

Pushing ahead of several other units, Anubis managed to get back to the surface in decent time, saluting Fefnir as he approached his commanding officer. "Sir, there was no one—"

Fefnir had his buster half-charged as he waited for the lupine Reploid to surface, and his weapon collided with the unfortunate unit's jaw with cataclysmic velocity, the half-charge wrapping the gun in flames and adding additional force to the impact. The blow ripped Anubis off his feet, flinging him dozens of yards out into the desert. "_I know what there was in there!_ I didn't want to admit it, but there it is! Fine, I don't care anymore! Just get out of my sight. Take this army of pawns and get back to the stupid city. _Go!_"

The command was issued through the ranks, the Pantheons and Golems the first to form up and start heading back to the Trans Server that had gotten all of them here in the first place, and Hanumachine made a point of taking the long way around the facility to avoid Fefnir's rage. Several of the PZ units were tasked with ensuring that the units that weren't supposed to be active were returned to the holding facility Fefnir had removed them from and returned to their offline state.

A smaller group of the PZs were told to remain behind, some distance from the location, just to keep an eye on the Guardian. It wouldn't do to have the last General of Neo Arcadia to self-destruct out in the middle of the wasteland.

From where he'd finally come to a stop, yards from his commanding officer, Anubis pushed himself up into a kneeling position, reaching up to his muzzle and finding the lower portion of his jaw connected by only a few sparking wires and one really stubborn bit of synth-skin, and his sensors were screaming at the injury, at the pain. Quickly offlining the tactile network to his face, the lupine Reploid yanked the damaged remains of his jaw away, considering the horribly mangled scrap Fefnir had made of it, and he was almost afraid to find out what the rest of him looked like. Unsteadily pushing himself to his feet, he moved to where his staff had fallen in the sand, leaning against the stave for a moment as he tried to figure out just how far gone the general was that a simple report could have resulted in so violent and debilitating an injury.

He knew better than to ask Fefnir directly, especially with the Reploid's mental condition already so strained by the loss of his siblings, and he ducked down as he joined the rest of the units leaving for the city. While, yes, he was tasked with patrols in this area, his subordinates could handle the work until he got his face put back together.

Fefnir opened a link with Hanumachine. '_Help Anubis get back to the city to have his jaw looked over. I'm going in to take a look for myself._' He turned away from the throng of units forming up at the front of the complex to allow himself a moment to wipe a frustrated tear from his eye. '_I should be back in Neo Arcadia shortly after the last of the units are accounted for and returned to where they belong._'

'_There is nothing there but dust and the relics of a forgotten past,_' Hanumachine warned. '_Do not needlessly risk yourself to only further instill in your mind that your brother lied. General,_' and there was a hesitation there, so uncommon to the unit. '_General Fefnir, do try to ensure that whatever you do blow up, you do so from a safe distance. Your father will not survive the loss of the last of his children._'

'_I'm not so sure about how he would take the loss of his 'precious last child', but I'm fairly certain it would only inconvenience him, just as it has the other three times he lost someone dear to him. I'll stay in one piece, and even if I don't, I'm sure he'll be able to figure out which four Lieutenants he'd want to promote to pick up the slack. I'd give a recommendation, but I think it may end up working against you in the long run. Go on and get out of here before I find out how flexible your tail is._' He abruptly cut the link, headed for the nearest entrance, and started into the remains of the complex.

Fefnir wasn't sure what he was hoping to find in the broken remnants of the facility, but he somehow felt compelled to walk to the bottom of the complex, as if some part of him couldn't acknowledge that he had seen this farce through to the end unless he walked to said end himself.

Passing through the first level was easy enough, seeing as the ceiling of the structure was riddled with holes, the sands and winds of many decades having worn smooth the crack and pockmarks, widening them into gaps and holes that let the light seep into the dead facility and mingle with the dust and debris of an age seemingly so long ago.

There were even a few holes in the floor, he discovered, but not enough to be able to see by when he descended to the next level. "What the hell am I even doing here?" he wondered to himself, engaging the infrared setting for his optics. "There's nothing here, I know that, so why am I even bothering?" The Guardian shook his head. "Forget it. I need to blow off some steam anyway. May as well do it where there's no worries about collateral damage for once." The going was easy enough, since he wasn't trying to be covert, and there were a few areas of heavy debris, though nothing that could stand up to his busters, especially when he charged his shots. One group of beams heaped in a hallway provided a particularly satisfying display when he charged both busters up and let fly with a double stream of intense flames, the entire hall getting scorched from the heat and the beams themselves melting into slag and pooling in the hall and nearby rooms.

The red Reploid jumped the pool of lava he had just created, boosting over the molten puddle so as to not abruptly land in his own destruction. He turned and looked at the carnage for a moment longer, noting that the molten metal was already eating a few small holes in the floor. "I guess I should've thought that through a bit better, huh?" he said to no one in particular. "Well, too bad, it got the job done, didn't it?" And at that moment, a memory came rushing to the forefront of his mind.

"_Hey, it got the job done, didn't it? Who cares if the rest of them couldn't keep up? If that stupid Maverick leader hadn't kept slinging cannon fodder at those worthless hostages—"_

"_That's not the point of the exercise," and X sighed a bit, leaning against the wall of the observation deck. "Fefnir, why did I build this city?"_

"_To keep people safe," Fefnir droned, rolling his eyes. "But if they can't even protect themselves from a few mechaniloids, then how are they supposed to keep themselves safe long enough to get away?"_

"_Again, you're missing the point. Neo Arcadia is sanctuary, a beacon of hope, even with the chance for a resurgence with Mother Elf still out there," and X turned to Harpuia. "Why am I allowing you to undergo the same training I did, giving you the necessary skillsets so that, if it ever comes to it, you can serve as part of the military?"_

_Harpuia's stance was proud, somehow imposing despite he and Fefnir being the same height, "It's because we're your children," he replied. "It's because the people of this city look to you not only as 'Master X', but also as the hero of the Maverick and Elf Wars. They know that you serve as a guiding hand during peacetime and sword and shield should when such action is required. By virtue of our relation to you, that promise of protection extends to us."_

"_Exactly. As much as I don't like the idea of sending my children out to fight, I will do everything I can to ensure you're ready to take the field as Generals, as warriors _and_ defenders," just as he and Zero had been. "As the Four Guardians of Neo Arcadia."_

_Harpuia was silent for a moment before looking to Fefnir. "You're too rash, too judgmental," he said. "You called the hostages 'worthless', but if their lives are of no value to you, what, then, are _you_ worth?"_

"_I'm not you, alright? I value people on their ability to fight. It's what I was _made_ to do. I'm every inch the combat Reploid. Now you're telling me that I have to learn to fight while protecting a bunch of saps that can't even hold their own for three minutes? I'm not a hero! I don't _want_ to be a hero! I'm just the one that gets the job done and over with. Anyway, this simulation is stupid. You're telling me that in an entire city full of fleeing civilians, some creep with too much mascara is going to focus all his attention on the group of people near me just because I'm there? Give me a break! That would never happen!"_

"_The simulation isn't stupid," X countered, his voice edging on annoyed, "because it _did_ happen, several _hundred_ times over, to me, to Zero, to _every single unit_ that served under the banner of the Maverick Hunters. The Mavericks didn't target those who posed a threat, they targeted those too weak to protect themselves. They focused on killing and infecting, destroying whatever stood in their way while adding to their numbers as quickly and as often as they could." The android took a deep breath, trying to steady himself at the wave of pain that came over him at the thought of his lost friend. "And you're not the only one who doesn't want to be considered a hero, Fef. Zero was just the same as you. He never wanted the medals, the accolades, the preferential treatment, the idolization. He just wanted to do what was right," had been trying to make amends for crimes that weren't rightly his._

_Fefnir let out a frustrated huff. "Fine, whatever, I'll do what I can for the paw—…_civilians_ next time. I just don't want to be put on some pedestal where I don't belong." He turned to his younger brother, who had been quietly brooding over the display the entire time. "Well, you were there, runt. Had it been the other way around, would _you_ have stuck around?"_

At that moment, a panel fell from the ceiling, the clatter registering in his ear. He turned toward the sound while still remembering that day, and saw something that hadn't happened at _all_.

"Of course I would have, but let me also offer you this thought," and Phantom's impossibly crimson eyes narrowed at his elder brother, "when it all started crashing down around us, who's the one that got left behind? I'm built for speed. I'm meant to be able to _move_. You? You're a hulking lummox of a Reploid who's so busy trying to keep himself alive that you don't see the way you're failing everyone around you until it's _far too late_."

Fefnir reeled from the shock of having his now-Maverick brother suddenly drop in from literally nowhere, and speaking as if he were remembering the same thought as himself. Were Mavericks linked to the ones they had known in life in such a way? He had no time to contemplate such things. A target had finally presented itself, and he had no intentions of allowing it to get away. "I _knew_ you were hiding down here, you sneaky bastard! You were waiting to catch me on my own like Harpuia and Leviathan, weren't you? What did they do to you, how did they bypass our immunity?! _Answer me, damn it_!"

"And what do you plan to achieve by calling me names, Fef?" Phantom sneered. "You think that walking through this facility and shooting everything in sight is going to change what's happened? You think all that's important is finding out the why and the how so that you can go back home feeling like you achieved something?"

Fefnir shook his head, his gaze hardening at his younger brother, and he questioned for a moment whether or not he could truly raise his weapons against his own sibling. He had to remind himself that he was doing this for the sake of those who couldn't fight for themselves, that he had no choice. He leveled his buster at his former brother and fellow Guardian. "I'm not just here for the how and why, runt. I'm here for closure. I'm here for justice. I'm here…to put a stop to your plans, whatever they may be. For the people of Neo Arcadia, for those who can't stand for themselves, and for myself. Hidden Phantom!" He began to charge his buster, his gaze leveled at the unit, "For the crimes of murder, _siblicide_, conspiracy to commit treason, _treason_, and conspiracy to commit crimes against humanity, I hereby judge you…"

The word threatened to gag him, catching his throat, as tears welled in his eyes, and he found himself suddenly unable to breathe. It was as if saying it condemned it to be true, as if he could somehow just convince the shell standing in front of him to simply stand down. But he knew better, and with the world growing cold around him, he passed judgment. "…_Maverick_." The word was bitter on his tongue, even with the knowledge of what his brother had done to their older siblings. He knew that this was the point of no return, his temper stoking itself once more, and the rest came out in a furious shout. "The penalty is _death_! _**What do you have to say for yourself, you monster?!**_"

"Where were _you_ when _I_ killed them?" and Phantom's face was a mask of insane glee. "When the scientists that gunned down your precious citizenry were retired, where were you? When Harpuia followed me into the pathways beneath Sub Arcadia, willingly entered his own crypt, where were you, _Guardian_ Fefnir?" The ninja took a few steps back, drawing his katana. "When I came for our _sister_, our brother at _my side_, where were you? Not at with her, not protecting her, not defending her, no. You stood at our father's side as if he hadn't survived decades of warfare, as if he couldn't defend himself, as if he isn't worth a _hundred_ of you. How can you justify the fact that _you let them all die_? How can you live with yourself, _Fighting Fefnir_, knowing that someone who was supposed to be every bit the combat Reploid, thought himself the diligent protector of the innocent, turned out to be _so damn __**weak**__?_" those last three words drawn out, an accusation.

Fefnir's rage exploded out of him in an inhuman cry of furious anguish. "_I never wanted her to be out there, damn you! I begged her not to go! Our dad _ordered_ her out there, like he didn't give a damn! I wanted to follow her more than anything else on this decayed husk of a planet!_" He was struck by an odd thought at that point. Normally, his buster was set up so that when he charged it only partially, the two small jets in the back of the buster would fire, effectively giving him a powerful, flaming punch. He had always wondered what it would be like to fire a full charge in such a way. The puppet pretending to be his brother was about to find out. "_**We were doing everything we could and you threw it in our faces!**_" and he fired the shot as he leaned forward to punch the Maverick.

The resulting force nearly ripped his arm from its socket, his considerable frame rocketing forward with the velocity of the attack, and it seem as if his entire arm was wreathed in terrible flames. The furious attack blew clean through his youngest brother, and for one terrible moment he thought he had vaporized his own family. Then his momentum abruptly ended with him crashing into a wall.

The wall and Fefnir both crumpled with the impact, large chunks of debris falling on and around the momentarily stunned Reploid. He pounded the ground in frustration, crying out to what he now understood to be no one, "_I did everything I could! I wanted her by my side!_ I wanted to…I wanted…I was just…" He slowly rose to his feet, tears burning a course down the sides of his face. For a while he simply stood there, gripping his busters tightly, too traumatized to think of how his memories had just betrayed him. Finally, he calmed down somewhat and had the good sense to make sure that he hadn't damaged himself with that ridiculously powerful punch and the resulting crash through the wall. Other than a bit of scorching on his left arm and a few dents in his armor around the calf area, he was no worse for wear.

He began to make his way through the complex once more, though simply blasting his way through had lost its appeal to him, and he now only destroyed what he couldn't make his way around or over. A few levels deeper and he had to switch from low-light to night-vision in his optics; the light of the sun didn't reach down this far. As he continued to explore the lower levels, he began to be aware of the echo his footfalls made on the ground. He stood still for a moment, drinking in the calm silence of a place lost to time, and thought of another time when he had truly been alone.

"_Do you even realize how _furious_ Harpy is with you right now?" Phantom asked, perched on Fefnir's desk, his gaze fixed on his older brother. "Of all the horribly insensitive things you've done over the years, this certainly takes the cake."_

_Fefnir sighed and rolled his eyes. "Look, I'll admit it probably came off as insensitive, but I just don't see the point in celebrating someone's birthday when they're still in the medical bay and in such bad shape that they won't even let us _see_ him to celebrate it with him. If you ask me, it seems like you guys are the heartless ones," and he raised an eyebrow at the two siblings in front of him. "For once, anyway."_

"_How can you call _us_ heartless?" and Phantom's voice betrayed just how insulted, how hurt, how _offended_ he was by Fefnir's reaction, by his behavior. "We did this because it's right, because it's all we _can_ do, and you throw that in our faces as if we're in the wrong?" The ninja shifted a bit in place, one hand running through his hair as he took a deep, calming breath. "After all that we've been through, as little as we're able to see of each other now that we're on almost permanent call and Father still running diagnostics, why are you so intent on pushing us away?"_

_The Jin'en General's shoulders slumped slightly. "I know, I know, we don't get to hang out together as much as we would like. But am I really the only one that thinks it's just a little messed up to celebrate someone's birthday while they're essentially in a coma in the room next door? I mean, _isn't_ there something wrong with this picture?" He raised his hands in a confused gesture. "Please, tell me how this was a good idea."_

_Phantom could only stare in disbelief, as if it was beyond his understanding that his brother could just stand there and justify his own actions while condemning theirs, and pleading eyes turned to their sister, hoping that she could talk some sense into Fefnir. She'd always been good at getting through to the unit when he and Harpuia were hitting brick walls._

"_Even if we can't spend this time with him, he's still our father,"_ _Leviathan began, and upset as she was, she managed to keep the accusatory tone that'd been present in Phantom's from her own voice. "With our patrols taking up so much of our time, and what time we do have to be off-duty consumed by paperwork and sleep…this is the first time in _months_ since we've been able to sit down together in an unofficial capacity. We can't go in there and see him, can't disturb him, but he's still there, and we're still…" And she sighed, letting her head loll back on the headrest of her chair for a few moments. "We have each other, and that's _it_, Fefnir. And as strong a face as we all put on, it's been wearing on us. So yes, we wanted to spend some time together, even when Father couldn't. He'd want to see us that way, not ignoring one another day in, day out, barely nodding to one another as we pass in the halls."_

_Fefnir deflated at her logic. "Fine, okay, I get it. We should be together more. I guess I'm alone on this one. Look, I'm sorry, alright? I just couldn't get into the festive mood. I feel like if I went I just would've been all sour on you guys."_

_Leviathan sighed at that. "Even if you'd been sour, it'd have been better than not showing at all." Because even a sour Fefnir was still trying. This absent Fefnir? Was all but screaming he didn't give a damn._

_Fefnir swallowed Leviathan's words like a bitter pill. "Yeah, you're right. I should have gone." He absently rubbed the bridge of his nose. "You really know how to stick it to a guy, Levi." He suddenly lowered his hand, a trace of irritation in his voice. "Ugh, listen to me. I sound like some stupid drama movie those marshmallows are always watching."_

"_You also sound like you need to get up and go apologize to Harpuia," Phantom added._

_Fefnir shot his younger brother an exasperated look. "Oh come on, runt. You really think I'm going to walk into _that_ fight? He can cool off for a bit first. I'm allergic to lightning, remember?"_

_Phantom moved from where he'd been crouched on the desk then, his expression an almost derisive sneer. "The hell makes you think he'll be drawing his sabers on you for something like this? At most, he _might_ get annoyed enough with you that you end up catching a right hook to the side of your head," although Phantom's tone indicated that the youngest of the AXRs thought that sounded like a _great_ idea. "You're the only one in the family that thinks the quickest way to fix any problem is by punching so many holes in whatever that it looks like Swiss cheese."_

_Fefnir pounded the table fiercely, sending a random stylus clattering to the floor. "And _you're_ the one who seems to think that his mouth can never get him into trouble!" He waved his hand dismissively. "Go on, get out! I'll go talk to his high holiness when I get the chance!" He turned his back on his siblings then. "And the next time you want to take that attitude with me, don't drag Levi along for the ride. Maybe I'll punch a few holes in you for your trouble."_

"_I'd like to see you _try_, tough guy," Phantom challenged, eyes narrowed. "You haven't gotten a good hit off on me in a few _years_ now."_

"_Both of you, knock it off! Look at you, bickering like newbuilts!" And Leviathan's tone clearly indicated that they were nearing the threshold of her patience. She held a hand up to both of them when they were ready to argue with her. "Fefnir, whether you realize it or not, you _did_ hurt Harpuia's feelings today. For that alone, an apology is due. And Phantom, I think you owe Fefnir one. There's nothing to be gained by goading each other along this way__."_

_Phantom sagged in place, letting out a heavy sigh. "For whatever it's not worth to you right now, I am sorry, Fefnir." He turned then, heading for the door, adding, "Shouldn't be the job of the baby of the family to set an example, though," and the door closed behind him before Fefnir could respond._

_The red Guardian threw his hands in the air. "Oh, for crying out loud! Does he really have to get the last word _every_ time? Here I am, about to make my peace, and he slams the door in my face!" He turned a pleading gaze to his sister. "I _am_ sorry, but do you see why he drives me nuts? I mean, I know—"_

"Enough,_ Fefnir." Leviathan cut him off, her voice nearly a snap. "We all get on one another's nerves from time to time. And don't apologize to me. You need to go find Harpuia _right now_ and apologize to him."_

_Fefnir face tightened into a slight grimace. "Okay, I'm going, I'm going." He shook his head slowly as he made his way to the door. He paused a moment in the doorway and looked back over his shoulder at Leviathan. "You know, you don't _always_ have to act like you're my mom. I wasn't planning on trying to dodge out of apologizing to Harpy."_

"_Like I said, Fef, you don't owe me the apology," and as insulted as she'd been by his actions, she hadn't been hurt the way Harpuia was. "Though I appreciate the effort. Thank you." She sighed and moved for the door as well. She had her own duties, her own responsibilities to attend to now that the party was over._

_As Leviathan passed him in the doorway, Fefnir reached out and took her hand in his. "Wait," he said in an apologetic tone, "I owe all three of you an apology, not just Harpy. Thanks for being so level-headed all the time," and he pulled his sister into a warm embrace._

Leviathan was still for a long moment, her posture becoming nearly ramrod straight. When she finally did speak, her voice was as empty and cold as the deepest trenches of the ocean. "It's not as though I have the option to vent my feelings when the three of you are always running around, acting before you think." She pulled back from him then, the flash of brilliant crimson overtaking her irises so horribly out of place on her countenance. "You continually push us away with your thoughtlessness, and you expect what? That we'll just smile and forgive you every time, forever? I'm _sick_ of this, Fefnir."

Fefnir recoiled in horror from the twisted mockery of his sister that stood before him, a part of him not wanting to believe that she was here, not after what had happened with Phantom.

Or, rather, what his own mind had done to Phantom's memory.

"You didn't say that," he said, his voice shaky, confused. "You never said anything like that!"

"And once again, you've pushed us away. You were sure to stay safe and warm at home with Father, weren't you? And in the end, it was I who shouldered the burden of our grief," and Leviathan shifted her ranseur in her grip as she spoke, not quite leaning on it as she held it with familiar military decorum.

Another pang of anguish twisted inside him at Leviathan's words, and he sank to one knee before her, clutching his chest. "I'm so sorry. I never wanted to let you leave. If I could have found _any_ way to take your place, you know I would have gladly done so." Tears streamed down his face as he raised his eyes to meet hers, stained by the virus though they were, nothing left of his sister behind those carmine orbs. "Please, please, I'm begging you, forgive me." He knew he asked the impossible, but he no longer cared.

If she struck him down here, at least his torment would be at an end.

Leviathan didn't grace him with a single word. Instead, her red gaze bored into him, nothing but cold wrath present in her eyes. Then she turned on one heel, her motions practiced and smooth as she began to walk away.

He was ready to be lied to, ready even to face death, but this? This silent abandonment was more than he could bear. "Levi, wait!"

She didn't flinch, didn't falter, and didn't give a single damn cue that she'd even _heard_ him. She continued, each step another accusation, another condemnation.

Fefnir rose as if in a dream, swaying slightly with the weight of her rejection, his vision swimming with the tears that were now coursing freely down his face. "Damn it, Levi, I'm so sorry," he said to himself softly. To her retreating figure, he called out, "I wanted to go with you, Leviathan. I abandoned you when you needed me more than any other time, and I _couldn't be there with you_. You were in the middle of the ocean! I would never have been able to keep up, but I still should have tried, is that what you're trying to say? Then come back and say it!" He took a few steps toward her, matching her pace. "Come back, damn it!"

Her pace only increased, quickening with each step, pulling further from him even as he pushed himself to move faster, to get closer. Another acrimonious glare was tossed over her shoulder at his insistence, at his tenacity, and her voice was cold and flat as she snapped, "Come back? Why? So I can keep taking your hand, keep walking you through, keep navigating _for_ you? Learn to walk _on your own_, Fefnir!"

Fefnir did his best to keep up with his sister, but somehow she continued to outpace him, even as he broke into a run, and finally into an open sprint. He called out to her again, "Levi, please, slow down and listen! I beg you, just let me have one more chance!" But his pleas fell on deaf ears. She seemed no longer interested in even acknowledging his voice as she continued to widen the rift between them with each stride. He was still pleading with her when his leg caught on a stray chunk of concrete and he flew forward, landing roughly on his shoulder as his momentum sent him to tumbling end over end, coming to a rest some distance away, sprawled on his back. He caught one final look at what remained of his sister, contempt and disgust in her carmine eyes as she slowed to a walk once more, the clack of her heels on the stone floor the only sound in the world as she turned her vitriolic gaze from him, Fefnir reaching a desperate hand out to her.

She disappeared from sight before long, and those footfalls were all that could be heard until even they disappeared, the last few echoes of sound petering off in the distance.

Fefnir called out to her once more, "Wait, please, come back, Levi!" His hand dropped limply to the ground as he realized that the Leviathan he had been chasing was nothing more than a feeble grasp by his fracturing mind to see her one last time. He screamed his sorrow to the heavens and to no one, knowing that, wherever she and their brothers may be, they would never hear him. "_Come back! Leviathan! Phantom! Harpuia! Please come back! _I'm so sorry for everything…" his words tapering off into a final, whispered, "Come back."

For a moment that seemed to stretch on for eternity, Neo Arcadia's final Guardian simply lay there, betrayed by his memories a second time. When he finally pushed himself from the floor, his motions were stiff and he felt a hollow sensation deep within his frame. He gazed longingly at the area where he last saw his betrayed and abandoned sister, and for reasons he could no longer fathom, he lurched further into the depths of the desiccated facility.

The remaining floors held little else but dust and darkness as Fefnir moved through them, pulled by a force he could not identify, no longer caring but drawn forward all the same. Once or twice he stumbled over some small, unnoticed object, but could not bring himself to even turn to see what it was that had tripped him up. He dreaded what he felt must await him at the end of this terrible journey, and yet his treacherous feet carried him onward, downward, inexorably closer to what he was certain would spell his doom.

"_You're not going to get far if you keep relying on nothing more than brute strength, Fef," Harpuia intoned softly, resting a hand on his younger brother's shoulder. "You can't simply go through life turning all your problems to ash. You're better than—"_

Stumbling a bit as he turned, Fefnir reached up to knock the Rekku Guardian's invisible hand away from him, a few uneasy steps barely managing to keep him on his feet, and a low whimper escaped him, "No, please no, no more," and he clutched at the sides of his head, forcing the memory to recede into the depths of his mind. He began to move forward, rekindled purpose evident in his stride.

Another level down, Fefnir stopped unconsciously at a break in the floor, the other side having buckled and lowered roughly a foot from his current position, and another memory threatened to overtake him.

"_Hold here," Harpuia said, the thrusters on his wings quieting as he landed beside Fefnir. "The units we have with us will be enough to take them on, but we need to hold the high ground. Keep your troops here, make sure nothing gets—"_

Fefnir roughly and repeatedly slammed his fists against the sides of his head. "Enough! I won't let it happen!" Still clutching his head, he stepped down and began to move forward once again. "Please…no more…I can't, I can't—" His words ground together in a feral snarl, and he began to pick up speed. It wasn't long before he was sprinting at full tilt again, slamming into doorways and loose debris scattered about the hallways, a few stray tears sliding down his cheeks as he moved tumultuously through the catacombs of an age since past. In his haste, he failed to see a low-hanging beam in his path, his head coming into swift and jarring contact first with the girder and then the floor.

Dabbing lightly at his forehead, he felt a thin trail of fluid coursing slowly down his synth-skin, his fingertips stained crimson as he pulled his hand away. He rose slowly, carefully avoiding the beam as he stood, the hall spinning around him as his internal gyroscope reconfirmed which way 'up' was. The impact calmed his nerves somewhat, even as it left him with a slight pain just above his left eye and one of the horns of his helmet bent backwards. He began to pick his way forward once again, methodically making his way to the nearby staircase and descending to the next level as calmly as his mental state would allow.

He forced himself to take a few steady breaths then, removing his helmet to run a hand through his black hair, wincing slightly as he brushed the cut above his eyes. He had no intention of shutting off the nerve relay, however; partially because he'd never been one to shy from pain, but mostly to remind himself that whatever was happening, it was all in his head. It was his own mind digging up pieces of his past to use against him, reminding him of his failures and shortcomings. He understood that now.

He also knew that this would be his greatest challenge yet.

Placing his helm firmly back on his head, he considered one last time the prospect of simply returning to the surface and razing this tomb to the ground.

Against his own better judgment, he purposefully called a particular memory to mind. "Aw, come on, Harpy, a fail's a fail. Why waste the time trying salvage a sim I already know I messed up on just to get a failing grade? Why _not_ just reset and try again?"

As if answering the quiet beckon, the memory continued unhindered his his mind.

"_It's not that simple in real life, Fef," Harpuia answered, landing on the sim deck beside his brother, a reassuring look on his face. "If you could just reset the real world, maybe, but life doesn't offer us that luxury. Besides, even a failed sim is a lesson learned."_

His memory spoke a sullen _"I guess I see what you mean"_ before Fefnir cut off the memory with a laugh. "Yeah, Harpy, I see perfectly now. I can't just pretend it didn't happen. I have to see this through, whatever it may cost me in the long run. Time to take the failing grade…" He laughed again, but the sound echoing off the walls was more like a sob, and he shook off a fresh wave of angst as it threatened to overtake him. "If I'm going to finish this," he chided himself, "I'll at least finish with a little dignity, damn it." He searched around for the hidden entrance to the final area of the complex he had been told about, and caught a faint scent of charred metal and scorched plastic before long.

He knew he was going to have to face his brother, and he knew just where he was going to be waiting for him.

A few more minutes of searching led him to a room that he supposed was where the infiltration team had sent the message about the secret room a lifetime ago. He saw markings where something had recently been dragged to a hole in the floor. A few shards of red glass told him it was most likely a Pantheon that had been dragged down, though Fefnir could only guess as to the reason. He looked at the gap in the floor, confirming his guess when he saw that the hole was actually a hidden trapdoor leading into the darkness.

"Nothing left to do but go down," he told no one, and he began climbing down to the final resting place of dust and ruin. On the way down, one of the rungs on the ladder suddenly gave way, and the sudden impact of his weight on the next run snapped that one as well, and the third after that. He scrambled to catch one of the rungs that remained as he fell that short distance, then his foot slipped on the fourth rung from the one that had originally snapped, and he fell suddenly forward, jarring his shin on the ladder before flipping end over end once more, banging his head and wrenching his ankle on the ladder before he finally gave up on trying to catch it. He crumpled with the impact on the floor shortly after, landing once again on the shoulder he injured chasing the ghost of his sister.

A moment after Fefnir had come crashing down onto the floor of the final level of the facility, something in the darkness crackled and snapped, the sound like lightning in the confined area, and on the last echoes of that sound, Harpuia's voice rang out from everywhere and nowhere all at once. "Look at you—the last, sad, broken Guardian of that miserable, dying city, clinging to a senseless hope, no better than a mewling newbuilt afraid of the monsters hiding in the shadows." Those words, that verbal attack, hung in the air for a moment before the unseen unit added, "How _pathetic_."

A low moan escaped Fefnir as he shifted from his side so that he was laying on his stomach on the cool metal floor. With a grunt of effort, he placed his hands on the ground and slowly eased himself into a kneeling position. Finally, to the phantom voice, he called out, "Shut up. You're not real."

A mocking laughter filled the air for a moment, the amused sound once again having no focal point anywhere in the room. "Tell me, Fefnir, what is it that you came here to achieve? What childish delusion were you seeking to fulfill?"

Fefnir struggled to rise, found that he couldn't, and smiled despite himself. "Reason? I didn't have too much of a reason. Even I knew Phantom's information was most likely false. But it was better than simply doing the same _nothing_ that I had done from the start."

"At least you're willing to acknowledge how useless you've been," and Harpuia's voice held so much malice. "Always seeking the answers from the rest of us, waiting for us to clean up your messes, letting us shoulder your burdens because you never really cared."

Fefnir's fatigue gave way partially to anger then, and he stood, looking around the room for his accuser. "What do you want out of me? I already know this is too little, too late, but there's nothing else for me to do."

"Too little, too late?" and Harpuia scoffed, another sinister chortle escaping him, echoing through the darkened chamber. "As if you expected things to ever end any differently? How blind have you been all these years to your pride, your ambition, your _ego_, shunting us aside in this search for power without purpose save your desire to be the best in all of the city? You tried to stand alone, apart from us, and now that we're lost to you, claimed by something you cannot save us from, _now_ you play as if we mattered?" Another derisive snort. "All we were to you were stepping stones, a means to an end, a way to test your strength, your mettle. And where has that gotten you? _Where_, Fefnir?"

Fefnir's temper was in full swing now, and he called out to the room, to the specter of his eldest brother, to the voice that now condemned him, "Damn you! Do you think I wanted _this_? Maybe I—"

"We all know what it was you wanted, Fefnir!" and Harpuia stepped out from the shadows then, his carmine gaze boring into the Guardian. "It's why you responded with anger when Phantom was marked Maverick. It's why I know you did not cry when my life became forfeit to him. It's why you remained in the safety of the city when we claimed our sister," and a few quick strides brought the siblings closer still, nothing but revulsion in his eyes as the eldest AXR considered his brother. "Now that you are Father's only child, have gained the solitude you so wanted, _now _do you feel complete?"

Fefnir knew that this was only an illusion, knew his brother was not actually there, but he grabbed Harpuia's throat all the same. "Do you honestly think I would actually feel _complete_ after losing my entire family?! Even as a Maverick, how could you say such a thing?"

Hands moved to the fingers wrapped around his neck as Harpuia's glare continued to pierce Fefnir's gaze, and the unit growled out, "Your _entire_ family?" His grin was devious. "What of our father, Fefnir? Do you wish for us to claim him as well? Would you like us to leave the city in your _capable_ hands?"

To Fefnir, X had stopped being a father when he'd come back from the medical wing four years ago, but even a heartless father was better than no father at all, and the thought of being alone—_truly_ alone—caused the remnants of Fefnir's psyche to give way. "_You bastard!_ How _dare_ you mock our father by claiming you could ever get close enough to do such a thing? You think I have no purpose for my power?!" His body began to glow with an intense light as he activated his Armored Phenomenon, tossing the conjured image of his eldest brother aside as he gradually took the form of a monstrous tank. "My purpose is this," he said as the transformation finished. "Your poisonous words will never reach another soul as long as I live! My purpose is to lay the memory of what you were to rest, to keep the honor of your names intact!" He charged the immense cannons mounted on his back as high as they could go, bypassing some of the safety protocols on them since he knew he wasn't going to be firing again anytime soon. "_My purpose,_" he cried out to the shadows, "_is to keep this tragedy from every happening to Neo Arcadia again!_"

The complex had been filled with the mistakes and lamentations of his past.

And now he was going to fill it with fire.

Some distance away from the complex proper, the Zan'ei squadron that had been left behind felt the first ripples in the ground beneath their feet, the sands shifting for a moment before what was left of the facility suddenly exploded into a pillar of fire. The concussive force of the blast hit them, send the eight units tumbling, and it took a moment for them to come to a stop, to dig themselves into the sand, and frightened eyes turned to the carnage being wrought by the last of Master X's children.

An enormous crater stood where the base had once been, nothing left of even the foundation. The sands in and around the crater itself were blackened by the explosion, some of the larger chunks of flaming wreckage were beginning to rain down everywhere, some large enough to leave small impressions of their own. Then one of the units called out, "There!"

In the middle of the crater was Fefnir.

The Reploid stood gaping at the smoke and ash flitting about in the wake of his monumental assault, his Armored Phenomenon having automatically dissipated in response to having its safety measures bypassed. Then the fatigue of his misadventure overcame him, and he fell to his knees, his peripheral blinking a warning that his last sub-tank was at thirty percent power. He shut the warning off, figuring that he still had enough of a charge to make it back to the Trans Server and then the city, when something on the ground caught his eye.

The ground around him had turned to glass and in his reflection, his eyes looked crimson.

"_No! I'm not one of them! I'm immune! I can't be one of them!_" He beat at his parallel image, clawing and slamming his fists into the still-hot glass. "_Give them back, damn it! I want things back the way they were! Harpuia! Phantom! Leviathan! Come back!_" _Or at least take me with you_, that thought having come unwanted to his mind, and with a resounding crack, he broke the mirror that had formed in the ground, cutting the synth-skin on his hands.

Balling his fists against the burning hot sands, the lost Guardian broke down into tears once again, sobs wracking his frame as he let go off all the terrible sorrow that he had been holding in since his family had started to fall apart.

The Zan'ei all heard the unit's cries, the desperate, pleading tone of his voice, each of them recognizing the hurt, the pain, knowing that something like this could not be forever held in, could not be constrained by a simple law that forbade them from being emotionally expressive.

"The city does not need to know," one of the units said, her comrades all nodding in agreement.

"That he managed this far is a miracle," another said, pushing to his feet and helping the others back to theirs.

Near the back of the group, PZ-153 looked over the carnage, the mark of Fefnir's rage, of his suffering, and her first few steps were heavy, laden with fear for what she was about to do. Refusing to acknowledge the way the others looked at her, she moved for the edge of the crater, skillfully moving around the flaming and still-hot wreckage, moving closer to the crumpled, weeping form of Neo Arcadia's final defender.

It took a moment to descend to the heart of the crater, but her steps slowed as she neared him, his armor scorched, dented and battered, the left horn nearly broken clean off his helmet, and she reached a shaking hand out to him.

Fefnir heard the sound of someone approaching him, and at first he thought that his now-Maverick siblings had come for him after all. Then he noticed the legs on the unit nearing him were from the PZ line, realizing what they were here for when he saw the hand reach out for him. "Turn me in. I don't care anymore," he told the unit, his voice husky with grief.

"No," she assured. "I won't. I _can't_," and her hand rested against his shoulder as she knelt down next to him. "It's not the punishment of the city and her laws you need," and there was a comforting smile on her face now, gentle and reassuring. "If you are to be turned in for letting your emotional matrix take control after all you've been through, then I'll turn myself in beside you, Guardian Fefnir." Leaning closer, she wrapped her arms around him, held him close in the hug she knew he desperately needed, none left within the city walls who could offer him this comfort, not without fearing for their own lives in turn.

For a moment that stretched on for eternity, Fefnir simply sat there, stunned by this seemingly random unit's bravery and compassion. His own hands rose slowly then, trembling with an uncertain terror of their own, not daring to be betrayed again, and when they finally reached her back he returned the embrace, clinging fiercely to her as a drowning man would hold onto a rescue boat after being adrift at sea for far too long. "I'm so sorry. Thank you so much," he whispered to her, then leaned against her, weeping openly into her shoulder.


	40. Fallout

_We would like to open, again, with an apology to our readers for the delay in the release of this chapter. As stated before, work schedules are not the greatest friend of writing, and Midnyght's fiancé has the unfortunate luck of a Thursday to Monday shift schedule that has him arriving home shortly after midnight. Between that and his and Midnyght's daughter starting school, free time for writing is a bit harder to come by. We will try to maintain as steady an update schedule as possible, and thank you all for your understanding with us now that we're reaching what we think is about the midway point of this story._

_So, Fefnir has gone a little batty, the Council is upset about the Guardian's actions, and explanations are in order. Tensions run high, emotional matrices get a bit overloaded, and once the dust settles in the Council Chamber, Copy X must turn his attention to other matters. The truth behind Telesphoros' assistance is finally revealed, the puzzle pieces start falling into place, and another unit cracks._

* * *

><p>"Oh, come on, the place was deserted anyway! Why are you even worried about what happened to it?" Fefnir scanned the expressions of the assembled Council members, noting their moods. Flizard seemed to be enjoying the occasion, while the rest of them seemed to range from simple curiosity to open vehemence, with a weary Inarabitta unable to look him in the eye. His father's indifference irked him the most, however. Here was his last child on trial, facing a council of judges that may deem him Maverick because of his actions and his father…<em>no, Master X,<em> he corrected himself, _he looks like he's sitting in on a meeting about Metall distribution. My fate couldn't have interested him less if I took my busters and decorated the ceiling with my processor._ He watched as Foxtar prepared to speak, disbelief and frustration written on his features. _Well, at least _they_ care about the mindset of Neo Arcadia's last Guardian._

"That does not excuse the reactivation of more than four _hundred_ patrol units that still haven't been verified as safe!" Foxtar fired back. "General, while I understand the motivation behind this, you moved them from their holding facilities_ through the city proper_ in order to access the Trans Server! Do you realize the risk that presented?"

Flizard gave Fefnir no room to respond, instead leveling his gaze on the vulpine Judge. "You and the rest of this Council are all but condemning him for something that needed to be done!"

"Not like this!" Foxtar fired back.

"I have to agree with him," Schilt supplied. "Even if, yes, the strike was needed, the location had to be searched, the Guardian has full command of all four divisions of the Neo Arcadian military. He had squads from three of the divisions _with_ him; was it that much to take actual skilled units with him rather than scouts, rather than our mobile tanks?" He turned to Fefnir then. "There are thousands of units split between just the Jin'en and the Zan'ei, so what would have indicated that you needed Pantheon and Golem squads with you?"

Fefnir pondered his words for a moment. "I took the units I did because I wanted to put as little strain on the resources here as possible. I realize that the units I took were a risk. But I didn't want to take a chance that the Resistance forces, now stronger by yet another of my siblings, would break the pattern and assault the city rather than try to capture me. I took those units because they were more expendable than a small army of PZ, FJ, and HR units, _especially_ because of the coding issue." He bowed slightly to the council. "And with all due respect, I would like to think that I at least took what precautions I could in regards to moving them through the city. I used a Trans Server in a remote section of the city. I cleared the roads with the assistance of the PZ and HR units I had taken with me, as well as Hanumachine. I even made sure that I had only the Golems active in order to have them help me and the FJ units pull the inactive Pantheons over to the Trans Server just so I could make sure they spent as little time active in the city as I could. The fact that we were able to move so many troops without any civilians actually seeing them, even if the ones nearby knew what was going on, speaks volumes for the units I had taken with me. Whatever you decide in my case, I think the others deserve a commendation for that alone."

That put quite the smirk on Flizard's face, though he did keep himself from applauding the AXR.

Schilt couldn't help but agree that precautions had been taken, but their authority as a whole superseded Fefnir's, and the Guardian had violated a direct order. From their discussions prior to Fefnir's arrival, he knew that Kelverian and le Cactank agreed with him that some form of punishment was due for the unit's insubordination. If the others agreed was what remained to be seen.

Foxtar leaned back in his chair at that, one hand worrying his brow. "General, despite the precautions you took, what procedures, what security measures, what guarantees did you have that they'd remain a non-threat to the populace in the event their emergency protocols were reactivated?"

Fefnir knew he had no answer to this question, so he decided to come clean with the truth in the hopes that at least his honesty would grant him some measure of mercy from the Council. "When it all comes down to it, I didn't_ have_ a plan in the event their protocols were triggered. That was the whole point of taking as many precautions and security measures as I could—to keep it from happening."

"No…" and Foxtar turned to look at his fellow Judges, at a complete loss for words.

Biblio leaned forward, his gaze focused on the Guardian. "No plan, no countermeasures, and need this Council remind you that there are…rather, were only two combat-ready units known to be able to take a Golem down by themselves? None of the units you took would have been able to stop a renegade unit."

"Perhaps as part of a team they would," Flizard supplied. "Golems aren't as impervious as you seem to think. That aside, Guardian Fefnir has proven through the simulations that he's capable of taking down a Golem without support."

"While that's true," Biblio fired back, "Guardians Harpuia and Phantom held the best marks in those simulations. Yes, Fefnir is capable, but his completion time for that sim was nearly three times the others."

"That could be explained away by weapon sets," Schilt offered. "Both Harpuia and Phantom were saber users, a consistent flaw in the defense parameters of the Golems."

"None of the Rekku or Jin'en forces are saber users," Inarabitta countered. "And only a handful of the Zan'ei were trained in their use." When it all came down to it, Harpuia and Phantom had been part of a rare and elite breed of fighter, preferring modified close-combat weapons to the distance provided by buster use.

"They're not invulnerable," Flizard snapped.

"They're damned close," Foxtar responded.

"_I_ could take out a Golem," came the immediate retort.

Foxtar barely kept his snort in check at that. "The only units in this room with capabilities worth of boasting about regarding Golems are Judges Schilt and Biblio, as well as Master X."

Copy X's gaze darted to the bickering duo for a moment before tapping his hand against the table. "Perhaps we could settle this matter in the simulations _after_ we have come to a decision regarding Fefnir's case? I doubt the Guardian wants to be bothered with hearing our petty squabbles and egos get in the way of his hearing."

Both Judges fell silent at that, bowing their heads in deference.

"Our apologies, Master X," Foxtar said, settling back into his seat.

Flizard offered no reply, simply turning his attention back to Fefnir.

Fefnir bowed lightly once more, and this time he avoided the collective gaze of the Council as he spoke. "I apologize that my rash decision has caused such an uproar in the Council chambers, but I believe that we can all agree at this point that however bad the decision was to bring so many potentially harmful units through the city, unpopulated portion though it may have been, we were fortunate that nothing came of it. That being the case, I urge that the Council make what decision they will regarding this particular point of contention and continue with the hearing."

"Fortunate indeed," Kelverian noted, "and your opinion on this is recognized. I believe that, at least by majority vote, this Council will see to it that your access and authorization codes to the Pantheon and Golem activation protocols are suspended until further notice."

"Seconded," Foxtar quipped.

"In favor," Inarabitta and Mantisk chimed, almost in unison.

"I think you're all nuts," Flizard said. "I submit a vote of dissent on this point."

"In favor," le Cactank supplied, providing the majority vote. "Flizard, I realize you value action over planning in most cases, but the safety of the city is paramount to any potential gain that could have been had were the coordinates not a false lead."

"For the record," and Kelverian turned to the last two Judges and Copy X.

"In favor," Biblio said, Schilt nodding in agreement.

"I submit vote of dissent," Copy X said. "While safety of the city is paramount, the actions taken in this case show initiative to strike against a supposed target, a supposed stronghold, before these units attempt a direct strike on the city. In essence, a probable threat to the city—the reactivation of the Golems within the Dome—is outweighed by the likely threat presented by the three lost Guardians. That the Maverick threat has extended to three of the four Generals is concerning, to say the least." There was a moment of silence as the replicate's carmine gaze turned to Fefnir. "I do have to wonder, though, how it is that you now stand in command of the entire might of Neo Arcadia's military, have a _dozen_ Lieutenants under your command, yet you sought little in the way of counsel from any one of them. The reports simply indicate your communications with Lieutenants Hanumachine and Magnion prior to the assault, and that you had only Hanumachine and Anubis under your command during the assault proper."

Even with his own life hanging in the balance, he somehow found time to be upset at the words his supposed father had chosen. _Guardians? Generals? Jeez, Dad, what have we become to you, chess pieces? Would it be _that_ painful to shed a frickin' tear for the loss of your children?_

"As I said before, I took as few units as I could in order to lessen the strain on the city's defenses," Fefnir addressed his father with a decidedly neutral expression, choosing to respectfully ignore the way Foxtar had rolled his eyes at his statement regarding the number of units taken, "and the same holds true in regards to the number of Lieutenants I took with me. As for counsel, I'll admit that I was advised that the location was more than likely some form of trap, but I made my decision under the assumption that even if it _was_ a trap, there would still be _something_ waiting for me at the coordinates my baby brother left behind."

"Advised it was a trap and yet you walked into it willingly?" and the unit's eyes narrowed. "Not exactly the soundest military strategy I've ever heard of."

A soft sigh from Inarabitta at that, and the Judge looked to Fefnir, nothing but sorrow and condolence in his gaze. "That sounds like the plan of a unit willingly walking into his own demise."

"I wasn't aware that a unit walking into their own grave made a habit of blowing it up," and Flizard was wearing a bit of a smirk at that.

Foxtar's hands smacked against the table, and the vulpine Judge was on his feet then. "If all this case is to you is a joke and a matter of idle jest, recuse yourself and take your wasted humor elsewhere!"

"A joke?" The Judge tilted his head at that. "No, this isn't a joke. I made it clear before Fefnir arrived that I think he needs a pat on the back and more units set under his command for a broad-range sweep. We're sitting on our asses here like the Eden Dome is going to protect us when Harpuia was snatched out from right under us. Metaphorically, I suppose, considering he was beneath—"

"_Enough_," Kelverian said, his tone leaving no room for argument, doing what he could to spare father and brother the pain of being reminded of their losses. "Flizard, if all you're trying to do is incite the others, it will achieve nothing. Not all of us believe that walking into an area, busters blazing, is the penultimate solution. Yes, there are aspects of what Guardian Fefnir did that each of us can agree on, can agree _with, _but that does not mean we excuse or accept his actions as a whole."

"It's better than sitting here debating endlessly over the actions of the only remaining General left of our forces," Flizard shot back, "but fine, I'll sit back and watch the rest of you banter and prattle on like this is changing any of what's already happened."

Copy X waited a moment before reiterating, "You were advised that it was a trap and yet you still took over four hundred units with you into a possible Maverick den." By his tone and expression, the unit wanted to know why.

Fefnir leveled an acrimonious glare at his 'father'. "You know what, I don't know anymore. It seemed like a fairly decent plan at the time, but obviously, it _wasn't_. It's not like I can claim mental duress or anything. After all, I'd only lost my entire family in the course of a few weeks."

"Actually," Inarabitta spoke up again, his voice still soft, his countenance still belying how much Fefnir's actions had bothered him, "I was going to make the argument that mental and emotional duress was what led to the, ah, decontamination procedures that followed your inspection of the facility," a bit of hesitancy in his voice when he referred to the explosive results the endeavor had had.

"That brings up a good point, though. How do you excuse the obvious signs of emotional impulses affecting your judgment?" and Copy X leaned back a bit in his chair. "The emotional locks are supposed to be in place throughout Neo Arcadia, from the citizens all the way up to the command staff," and his gaze turned for a moment to Flizard and Foxtar before turning back to Fefnir. "And this is not the first time that I've had to deal with this blatant disregard for the laws. The other three AXRs all showed signs of being swayed by their emotional matrices in the course of the last few months."

Throughout the exchange, Fefnir's gaze had never moved from Copy X's face. "And what about yourself? Do you mean to tell me," and the vehemence built in his voice as he continued, "that you haven't had any type of emotional reaction at all? Have decades of watching your comrades die around you _truly_ made you so numb to the death of _your own children_?"

There was a momentary rage in Copy X's eyes at that accusation, and he straightened in his seat. "Unlike you and your siblings," he returned, "I know not to let my personal feelings affect my public reactions. Am I numb to this, to their loss? No, I am not numb to it, I just know better than to let it affect my job, _General_. Were I to respond as you have to their loss," and he stopped for a moment, considering just how deeply in this farce he needed to go. "Were news of what you did allowed to reach the ears of the citizenry, how do you think they'd feel knowing that emotional responses would have them marked Maverick and retired while you simply get away with a slap on the wrist? Were I to follow the example that seems to be set here, what reason would anyone in this city have to keep their own emotional matrices in check?"

Fefnir's expression calmed somewhat, but his voice remained just as intense. "Nobody's asking you to act like I did. Hell, half the time, _I _don't ask to act like I did, but I'm fairly certain that this city will forgive you for allowing yourself a moment to _grieve_ for the loss of your kids. I mean, from the moment the Order of Retirement was issued for Phantom, I haven't seen you so much as grimace, let alone shed a tear. At Levi's request, I stayed by your side while she went out on patrol. When they came for her, your tone was nonchalant, and you wouldn't even face me. At the time I thought you were trying to put on a brave face in front of me, but that's not the case is it? If it was, you would be recusing yourself from having to watch your last child face the Retirement Penalty, or at the very least you would have some understanding of _why_ I feel the way I do. Instead, you seem to be the one that wants to retire me the _most_ out of everyone in this room, even Foxtar! At least his drive to punish me I can understand! But you," and his face betrayed a hint of the pain he felt the Council neither needed nor deserved to see, "You've stopped caring at some point. I can't really say when, but I know you wouldn't be here, _condemning_ me with a law I never thought you could possibly implement, if you were still the father I remember."

Copy X's gaze had narrowed at that, and he shook his head slowly. "I am not condemning you, Fefnir, and I do not want to see you retired. What I want are answers. I want to know why you feel it so necessary to flaunt the very laws we've put in place, laws that exist for a _reason_, when the means by which you do so is so public. Yes, you're hurting, and don't think I don't care, that I don't see it, that I would cast you aside, retire you when you're all that remains of this city's hope. Yes, I know that we can't simply shut off our emotional matrices, ignore whatever is bothering us, but not once have I let their loss affect my ability to serve on this Council as Chief Judge, nor do I let their loss affect my ability to remain a neutral party in the cases we do hear."

"That's just it!" Fefnir pointed an accusing finger at Copy X. "Their loss hasn't affected you _at all_! Nothing that's happened in the past four years…" A light switched on in his head, as if something that had been bothering him for ages finally clicked into place. "…Ever since you came back from wherever it was you sealed Dark Elf. That's when you changed. I don't know what happened in there, but you haven't given a damn about _anything_ since that day. The Resistance is a group that _should never have existed_, but somehow you got so focused on providing quick fixes to the energy crisis that you've _blinded_ yourself to what you've actually done to the city! You think mine is the first family to be torn apart by your blatant mismanagement?! Have you even noticed?! Do you even_ care_—"

"Do _not_ dare question my judgment!" Copy X roared, getting to his feet at that, his scarlet gaze boring into the final Guardian. "That you were allowed to retain your name, your family ties, was a _courtesy_ I did not have to grant, AXR-003!"

All eight of the Judges couldn't help but _jump_ at the way Master X's demeanor had so suddenly and violently shifted, the way he was suddenly using his son's _serial_ in place of his name.

"You would have me turn my focus to the Resistance, to a group that has simply been a thorn in this city's side for nearly four years, when the city itself crumbles around us?! Until they claimed the other three units, they were no threat to this city!" He moved around the dais, his steps even, his stride sure, until he was face-to-face with Fefnir. "Everything I have done for this city, I have done to save it from the collapse coming from within! Everything I have done for this city, I have done to save these last faltering remnants of humanity! Everything I have done for this city, I have done because it is the only hope we have left! You care so much for the other units, yet how many of our citizens have fallen by your hands, AXR-003?! How many did the 001 unit kill?! AXR-004?! _AXR-002_?! All of us are stained by the sacrifice, but we will survive and we will rebuild! We are not innocent, but we do what is right, what is _necessary_!"

Fefnir grabbed Copy X by the bottom of his vest with both hands, lifting him bodily off the ground. "_You dare?! You would tell me that everything we've done, the blood on our hands, the lives we've destroyed, you would tell me that they were _necessary_?! That they were _right_?!_" Whirling him around to gather momentum, he flung the astonished Chief Judge onto the table where the other Judges looked on in horrified silence, Judges Biblio and Mantisk quickly leaning over to catch him, and Fefnir continued his tirade without letting any of the others assembled in the room gather so much as a thought. "_Death was _never_ the answer, do you hear me?! I'm telling you that your solution was wrong_ because_ of the blood on my hands, on the hands of my entire _family_! But you don't understand that! It's like this is all some kind of game to you! I don't know what you are, but you are _not_ the father that raised me to believe that every life is worth saving!_" He turned to leave the farce of a courtroom behind, and his fake father with it. "Decide whatever the hell you want about my fate." When he reached the double doors that led out of the chambers, he flung them both open wide and stopped after taking a few steps past them. "But know this. When, yes _when_, what's left of my _real_ family comes for me, I'm going to be out there, risking my hide for the sake of a city that's become a tyrant's plaything. Because I _am_ this city's final Guardian, and I will protect it." As the doors closed, Fefnir took a moment to recolor his eyes so that, when he looked over his shoulder at the Reploid he had condemned, they were the green of the father he remembered. "…Even if it means protecting it from you." His emerald gaze bore into Copy X until the doors swung fully closed.

"Master X," Kelverian asked after a moment, Fefnir's condemnation echoing in his mind, "are you alright?"

"If it is judgment he wants, then judgment I will pass," Copy X seethed. "Revoke all reactivation codes to the Pantheon and Golem forces, both active and inactive, for AXR-003. Lock down access to any and all Trans Servers outside of the Eden Dome. PZ," and the copy's gaze turned to one of the stationed guard units, "you're familiar with who in your division is most capable on the network. Ensure that someone is monitoring the Guardian's comm traffic at all times, and I want a unit shadowing him the moment he leaves the Tower. He goes _nowhere_ without it being reported."

"Understood, Master X," the unit said, bowing.

"Dismissed, unit," and Copy X waved his hand, the Zan'ei darting out of the Council Chambers. "Does anyone else have anything they'd like to add?"

The Judges remained silent.

"Then this session is over," and Copy X stood from his chair, moving around the dais and leaving the room. "You're all dismissed."

* * *

><p>Copy X jumped a bit when the door to his room slid open without any warning, turning and finding Telesphoros waiting patiently. "Good morning," he greeted, getting to his feet.<p>

"The same to you," Telesphoros returned with a smile, fidgeting a little with the bag slung over his shoulder. "I'm ready whenever you are."

A smile and a nod in return. "You finally settled on a containment unit?"

The blond patted his bag. "I've got everything I need for the extraction," he answered. "And I have to say, your engineering staff here really does do some excellent work. Most of their designs actually had better specs than mine."

"The best human and Reploid minds," Copy X agreed. "What's different from your designs?"

Turning, Telesphoros made for the lifts, Copy X at his side. "Mostly the containment field generator and the power system. My version would have worked, but the one they built has better long-term functionality. Seeing their work makes me wonder if I should see about requesting a research team of my own, if there are units to spare."

"If you'd like, I can see what the Judges think about a permanent reassignment of the units we'll be sending to work with you," Copy X offered.

"That sounds good," Telesphoros agreed. "So, where to?"

Copy X waited until the lift doors had closed and the car began to descend through the tower before answering, "Sanctum Yggdrasil."

"She's…she was kept in the city?" There was amazement in the unit's voice at that.

"I don't know what X was thinking when the sealing system was built at the heart of Neo Arcadia, but I have long since stopped questioning it," and Copy X's gaze grew a bit distant.

"You seem as if something is weighing heavy on your mind. Should we wait for another time, perhaps?"

Copy X blinked, then turned to his companion. "No, I'm fine. I just…I don't often go to the Sanctum."

"But you do visit?" Telesphoros' voice was tinted with a note of curiosity.

A nod. "To think. It's quiet there, relaxing despite the Dark Elf's presence," and Copy X's arms crossed over his chest. "It's odd, seeing his body there when I go."

"What kinds of thinking do you do there?"

"Mostly just…considering what I've been doing. I'm only four years old, and barely at that. I've the mind of a human teenager, bearing the burden of centuries I don't know."

A ghost of a smile at that. "You sound as if you seek the council of the dead."

"In a way, I think I do. So many days I worry that I have defiled and cursed his name. So many nights I spend worrying that I will be found out and vilified, destroyed as I have let so many be destroyed before, simply because I was made to stand in without the knowledge of how. That his remaining child no longer sees me as 'father'…it is only by merit of the unit's emotional outburst that no one else has latched on to the things I have done that stand in contrast to X's ways of thinking."

"Guardian Fefnir actually…" and Telesphoros settled a comforting hand on the shorter unit's shoulder. "I hope his outburst has not left you upset, though I am surprised. You've never seemed this…uncertain when in view of others."

"Would you have me display this concern for worries 'Master X' should not have?" Copy X asked. "And I have already dismissed AXR-003's reaction for what it was—emotional overload. I am not bothered by it; rather, that he no longer sees me as parent, I will suffer far less of him coming to me, be it for counsel or comfort."

"Still, this is a side of you that concerns me, would concern your builder," Telesphoros said.

"You shouldn't worry," Copy X assured him. "I can't help but think that it's a baseless concern, some part of me that echoes X's programming. I've…heard it in passing that he was a bit of a worrywart." He sagged against the lift as the car continued its downward passage. "Besides, dwelling will only ruin me."

"How so?"

"I cannot linger on thoughts of the past and what was and what might have been and what could have happened if I had known better or acted differently. I need to keep my focus, as I have for most of my operational time, on the future and how to correct things. I may not be the X everyone accepts me as, but I cannot refuse what has been assigned to me."

"You sound as if your mind is in conflict," and the blonde shook his head. "This is no way for you to be living. It's not healthy and it's not safe."

The lift slowed as it reached one of the lower levels of the tower, and Copy X fell silent as he strode from the car, Telesphoros close on his heels. Moving through the halls in silence, Copy X was watchful, careful that no one saw them, and moved for the access panel.

"You move like a thief in the night," Telesphoros said, reaching out for Copy X's shoulder as they moved through the pitch-black passageway.

"I thought it best to keep this hidden from anyone and everyone. The safety of the city is paramount."

"Still, even the Judges were shocked that you remain silent about this, about her."

"The fewer people know, the less people will worry," Copy X assured.

Telesphoros nodded, blinking a bit when the light from another lift assaulted his eyes. "That is a reasonable justification."

"You sound uncertain," Copy X noted, signaling the lift to begin its ascent.

Hands slid into the pockets of his lab coat as Telesphoros shrugged. "As I said, you sound as if you deal with a systems conflict between your concern for and certainty of your actions."

"Whatever worries I may have for my safety because of who I really am, the fact remains that I am this city's keeper. The architect of this sanctuary is dead, long since lost to the thing that destroyed our world in the first place," and Copy X shook his head. "I still don't understand why my maker lied to me."

"What?" Telesphoros was shocked. When had that happened?

"I remember him telling me that I'd been built only to stand in, only to serve until X could return," and the doors opened then, revealing the towering structure at the heart of the facility, "and yet here he lies, lost to the world, to the city he built, to the people that mistake me for him. Dead and gone, just like the friend that the history texts speak of, the other paragon of the ancient wars who birthed the monster caged here." Walking up to the capsule containing X's body, Copy X pressed a hand against the glass, bowing his head. "Why didn't he just tell me outright that I was meant to replace him?"

There was a momentary lapse in Telesphoros' gait, missed by the copy unit, but the blond shrugged his questions aside: they could be dealt with later. "How would you have reacted had he told you that you were?" Telesphoros asked, reaching into his bag and pulling out a tripod, setting it up near the roots of the tree.

"Do you think it better that I found out a little more than a year after I was activated?" Copy X asked.

"To burden a newbuilt, freshly activated, with the knowledge that he was to be a permanent replacement for another unit far older than any other on this planet? No, he likely felt it was for the best that you have time to grow and develop, let the truth come up when you were older."

"You sound as if he never spoke to you about this."

Telesphoros shook his head. "He didn't, really. I was not as instrumental to your construction as you may want to believe, and your maker has always been the quiet type. He wouldn't let me know of things that didn't pertain to my own assignments." Pulling a portable holo-terminal out of the bag, he secured it on the tripod, plugging a cable into the base of the unit. "Any idea where I can link to the pod?"

"Here," Copy X said, pointing to a set of ports on the side of the pod. "I often wondered why the pod was built with these."

"Did you honestly think a cure would never be found?"

Copy X shrugged. "It's easy to lose hope when so much gets dropped on you."

"Perhaps," and Telesphoros plugged the cable in. "Okay, so…crap."

"What's wrong?" Copy X asked, moving over to Telesphoros' side and looking at the screen that had popped up. "What's that?"

"It's setting up a connection, but it's not recognizing the system as one that's compatible. I hope I can bypass whatever security systems might be on this when the system registers that I'm not using an authorized terminal." Telesphoros' lips pursed in a tight line, watching the data streaming along the screen.

There was a sudden flash of motion, and both Telesphoros and Copy X looked to the golden orb above X's pod.

"Is that…?" Copy X asked, astounded by the sight.

Jet black eyes stared out at them, the elf's wings furled around her.

"She knows we're here, knows I'm accessing the system," Telesphoros said.

"Will she try to escape?"

"I don't think she can. I'd have to take down the seals first," but his eyes flitted to the screen nonetheless.

A moment of silence passed before the Dark Elf retreated within the containment unit, away from the gaze of the units idling outside her prison, away from the unit that sent a wave of fear through her systems.

"That was a bit of a shock," Copy X said.

"You've not seen her before?"

Shaking his head, Copy X turned to Telesphoros. "That's the first time I've ever seen her."

Blue eyes trailed up to the orb for a moment, then back down to the display screen, Telesphoros pulling the bag from his shoulders. Reaching in, a new cable and the containment unit he'd grabbed from the engineering department were removed, quickly plugged into the pod, a small magnetic lock engaged to hold the containment unit against the side of the pod. Pressing a few buttons, the device shimmered, then hummed, the electromagnetic field engaging.

"What now?" Copy X asked.

"Well, as soon as I can link into the system, I'll start disengaging the seals," Telesphoros said, dropping the visor that had been sitting on top of his head down over his eyes. Wirelessly linking into the terminal, he started hacking away at the security protections, pulling down the defenses keeping Dark Elf caged.

"Thank you," Copy X said, slowly moving back to X's coffin.

Telesphoros looked at the unit through the visor, considering the sudden change in his tone. "What for?"

"This," Copy X said. "Fixing her. Fixing the power plant. Ending the Maverick scourge."

"Don't thank me yet," Telesphoros warned.

"No, I think now is as good a time as any," the replica said. "For the first time since my activation, I'm finally…finally the leader they need me to be. I'm taking my rightful place as the master of this city. I'm doing right by our people…_my_ people."

Above them, the highest of the nine boughs of leaves turned yellow, then brown, then finally to black.

"I may not ever be able to tell them that I'm not their true Master X," Copy X continued, no longer paying attention to what was going on with the tree, gaze locked on X's body, the serene face behind the pane of citrine-hued glass. "I may have lost so much, but this…this is…this is what I've been waiting for."

The second bough turned black, Telesphoros' hack cutting through the defenses even faster now.

"There is a future here, for humans and Reploids. A chance for things to finally start improving. A chance to finally undo what the wars unleashed." Copy X smiled, not seeing two more boughs turn black. "I am not the legend that they think I am, but I will become one," and there was a gleam in the copy's scarlet eyes when he looked to Telesphoros. "I can finally say that this city is_ mine._"

The fifth bough went black, and Telesphoros shook his head.

"What?" Copy X asked.

"You…" and the unit stopped, the sixth seal failing under his assault. "You are still a child."

"Perhaps," Copy X said, "but children grow and learn and become adults."

There were only two seals remaining now.

"That's not what I meant," and there was something in Telesphoros' tone now that unsettled Copy X.

A single bough still flourished.

"Then what?"

As the last of the nine sets of holographic leaves turned black, Telesphoros removed his visor, tossing the gear to the floor, the fragile equipment cracking, the display screen shattering into pieces.

Blood red eyes stared out from beneath the blonde hair.

"Who…?" Copy X said, and managed no more than that.

Dashing forward, the unit's fist made swift contact with Copy X's midsection, the Reploid doubling over at the impact and coughing.

Cackling, the unit pulled a small data stick from his pocket and jammed it into Copy X's data port.

Inside his head, there was a loud screech, white noise that flooded every part of Copy X's systems, and the replica's eyes greyed out as he collapsed to the floor, the sonic scrambler having forcibly offlined him.

Letting the copy's body fall to the floor, the unit removed his lab coat, drawing his saber from the sheath hidden beneath the cloth, where it had been all this time, and the magenta blade snapped to life with a quiet hiss.

Pressing his hand against the pane of glass between him and X's body, the blond smirked. "Time to return to me what is rightfully mine and finish what was started a century ago."

Pulling back, he stabbed the saber clean through the glass and into X's chest, piercing the unit's core.

Withdrawing the saber, Omega shut it off, placing it back in its hidden sheath, and he punched his hand through the glass and into the still-smoldering hole in X's chest.

"She's mine once more, X," Omega said, smirking wickedly as his fingers curled around X's core, wrapping tightly and squeezing, feeling coolant spill over his hand, reveling in the painful sensations of the electricity dancing over his arm as he crushed the android's core.

And beneath the feel of X's coolant streaming between his fingers and the metal cutting into his hand, Omega heard Dark Elf's panicked cries.

The fear overwhelmed her as she felt the pull of the demon that had imprisoned her all those years ago, yet she fought against his commands, his _demands_ of her.

It was all in vain. The seals had been broken, X's body destroyed, and despite her form, she was little more than data, unable to fight against the entity overriding her will. A silent scream, and she uploaded to the containment unit that the Neo Arcadians had designed.

Pulling the device from X's pod, Omega tucked it carefully into his bag, smirking as he disassembled the entire setup he'd brought with, systematically storing it all away.

But he wasn't done here.

The bag and the lab coat was moved near the lift, Copy X's prone form kicked off to the side of the room, and Omega turned blazing carmine eyes to the body still suspended in the pod. Raising one leg, a devastating kick destroyed what remained of the glass, and Omega punched his hand clear through the hole he'd made in the android's chest, yanking X's body from the crystalline prison, wires tearing and sparking, a fresh spout of coolant falling from where the synth-skin around his data port had ripped.

"I win," Omega said, pulling his arm back and grabbing for his saber, the blade slicing through X's neck before the empty shell had a chance to collapse to the floor.

Grabbing a cloth from the bag, Omega wiped his hand clean of the fluid that had stained it, his auto-repairs having already fixed the damage he'd inflicted on himself in destroying X's core, and he pulled the lab coat, still immaculately white, back on, the bag hung from his shoulder, his saber once more hidden away from prying eyes.

He smiled all the wider as he stepped onto the lift and took one last, long look at the destruction he had left behind him, burning the image into his memory banks as the lift doors slid shut.

* * *

><p>Systems came back online slowly, several of them having to reboot a couple of times before they started properly, and Copy X shuddered as he pushed himself into a kneeling position, wavering in place as his optics reset for the third time, the world still in a hazy sort of half-focus. Collapsing again, this time on his back, the unit blinked a few times, disoriented and confused.<p>

It took a moment before he realized where he was, and on the heels of that recognition, his entire frame tensed, battle protocols and proximity sensors screaming online, his buster arming even as he struggled to get all of his gross motor controls online and get to his feet. Telesphoros' twisted laughter rang in his ears, and even as he checked his chronometer, saw just how much time had passed, he still feared the unit was lying in wait.

Finally getting to his feet, wavering though he was, Copy X froze at the sight before him, of the Sanctum splattered with coolant, the original body of Neo Arcadia's leader broken, twisted, destroyed, and it took the replicate a moment to realize that the hollow, fractured sound echoing in the chamber was coming from him. A few shaky steps were taken, the unit carefully avoiding the red fluid that was creeping along in thin tendrils across the floor, and he felt the first tears sting at the corners of his eyes.

_Is this the culmination of my failure?_ he wondered, looking at the shell of the unit he'd been built to replace. _He called me a child. Telesphoros called me a _child_, and only now do I understand that it had nothing to do with my age._ Disengaging his buster, he watched as his arm slowly morphed back into its normal shape, tears trailing down his cheeks.

Beneath the pain, the betrayal, a part of him wondered just what Telesphoros had been up to, what the unit had been planning, why he'd go to such lengths, and the overwhelming flood of self-loathing brought the copy back down to his knees. "I'm sorry!" he cried. "_I'm sorry!_" All he had wanted was hope. All he had desired was to be who the city so desperately _needed _him to be.

In his naivety, in his blind quest to become a true heir to his borrowed name, all he had achieved was a new start to the Maverick plague.

Despite his own red eyes, he _knew_ why the laws regarding that eye color were in place.

"It's all my fault," he admitted through his tears, looking to X's body. "I blamed you, cursed what you had done to save this city, when I've been the one leading to our final destruction. I allowed the youngest of your children to leave the city, unaware of the taint he carried, unaware of how sick he was. I sat by, did _nothing_, when he killed the eldest. I have sat upon the throne of this city and cared nothing for anyone but myself while three of your own were lost, and the last of them…" and his hands curled into fists against his legs.

"_Don't thank me yet_," Telesphoros had warned, and that brought a new wave of emotions to the fore, the unit knowing just how terribly he'd been _used_ by the monster masquerading as a scientist. For a moment, Copy X wondered if Telesphoros had been the one to turn Phantom.

"She's lost to us now," he admitted, not daring to raise his eyes to the destroyed boughs of the great tree, unable to look at the cage that no longer held its prisoner. "She is lost, and how long before your final child falls to the same plague, the same fate, as his siblings? He is already broken, damaged by what the others have become, left weakened by their loss. I alone stand immune," and a soft tremor shook the copy's frame. "In the last remnants of this dying world, I am the only hope left."

Crimson eyes widened after a moment, Copy X pushing himself to his feet, and he stared at the shattered glass around the base of the tree, at the hollow coffin, and a twisted smile crossed his features then. "I _alone_ stand as the force that will end this. Immune to the virus, immune to her control," and Copy X laughed despite himself, "I am their final hope."

He sneered at the corpse on the floor. "I do not carry your sentimentality, those ties of affection that weakened you. I will find them, find all the Mavericks of our age, and I will _crush_ them. I do not care for their suffering, for their pain. I am not afraid to do what must be done to achieve peace. I am not _weak_ like you were said to be. I will stand against Telesphoros, the fallen Guardians, the Mavericks, the Dark Elf, _all of them will die by my hand!_"

His proclamation echoed off the walls of the chamber, rang in his ears. "Your ideology, your _hope_, your _kindness_, what did it gain you, X? Nothing! You sacrificed your life, died in this room, to cage your friend's child, to hold her in containment when you could have ended all of this by killing her! You built this city to be a beacon of hope, yet all you have achieved here is fear and despair! The citizens hide in their homes at the whisper of Maverick, the armies are scattered about in a desperate recurrence of your wars, and you did nothing to stop this!"

Rage filled his eyes, his voice, "You brought destruction and misery in the guise of a promise for new beginnings! I will take this city, _my city_, and I will make it perfect! I will make it what you meant for it to be by destroying any who would dare stand in opposition to me, to my will, my command, _my control_!"

A final cry to the room, to the fractured remains left to decay, "I will be better than you ever were! I will be more than you ever were! I will become legend, leader, guardian, keeper, ruler! I will take your name and write my legacy, leave you forgotten in the past where you belong! This future, this city, this world _is now mine and mine alone_!"

As silence fell over the room once more, Copy X turned for the lift, and he made a point not to look back to the ruination behind him as the doors closed.

There was only one way to look, only one way to move, and that was forward.

_As of now,_ he assured himself, _I have become X. I am X, and this city is mine to control._

* * *

><p><em>A quick note from Midnyght Saber before we leave you to your thoughts and comments:<em>

_I am glad so many of you showed interest in who Telesphoros was and what it was that he was trying to achieve by seeking possession of the Dark Elf. It was planned from the beginning that Omega would infiltrate the city under a disguise, and considering Omega means 'the end', I sought to find a name that reflected that without his character being too obvious. Telesphoros means "to bring about the end", which was more than fitting. It was only later that I discovered Telesphoros was also a Greek demi-god whose role was that of a healer, specifically one who aided individuals in recuperation from injury or illness. Quite a fitting name for him, had he not been after Dark Elf for more sinister reasons, no?_


	41. Storm Front

_Fefnir was careful enough not to attract the attention of the citizens of Neo Arcadia when he attacked the 'base'. Where he was careless? Not knowing that there were sleeper agents who were going to forward a report about his little fireworks display to the Resistance. So, while Copy X and Fefnir are busy shouting at one another in the city, the Resistance is setting up plans to move against the regime and the replicate ruling with X's face._

* * *

><p>Hirondelle was looking over the report he'd received that morning from Neige, rubbing at his forehead as his eyes scanned the text, worried at the contents. The details weren't as specific as he would have preferred, but with the events mentioned in the report, he was certain that this was the best he was going to manage.<p>

Even the PZ units that Phantom had personally trained wouldn't have been able to get out of the line of fire fast enough.

It only took a moment to find the signal he was looking for, and Hirondelle fired off a communications link request, the other unit quickly accepting. '_Guardian_ _Phantom, I need to speak with you as soon as possible._'

'_I'll be there shortly,_' he replied. '_Your office?_'

'_Yes,_' Hirondelle answered. '_And thank you._'

"Phantom, is everything okay?" Zero asked, looking to the unit, worried when he'd stopped in the middle of his cadence.

"Everything is fine, sir, though I must request to leave training early," he replied.

Leviathan's gaze was on Phantom and Zero, and she took a moment to finish her movement set before resting the butt of her ranseur on the ground. "What happened?"

Harpuia stopped as well, gazing at his brother curiously. For _Phantom_ to request to leave a training session early? "What's wrong?" he asked on the heels of Leviathan's question.

"Hirondelle just messaged me. Seems that he has something he needs to speak with me about, though he gave me no indication as to what." Phantom bowed to Zero. "My apologies for disrupting our session, Lieutenant Commander."

"Your duties to the Resistance take precedence," Zero said, dismissively waving one hand. "You can resume training later." Turning back to the remaining two Guardians, Zero moved back into the starting position for the saber cadence he was running through. "Zeroth, position one!"

Harpuia fell back a few paces, both his sabers held backwards, ready to begin the cadence series again.

Leviathan's motions mimicked Harpuia's and she fluidly slid back into her own starting position, the ranseur firmly gripped in both hands, the blade held at an incline, as though ready to attack.

Phantom moved quickly through the base, wall-jumping from floor to floor, and it wasn't long before he'd reached Hirondelle's office, the information officer waiting for him. "What's going on?"

"I got a report in this morning from Neige. Seems one of our operatives was on the front lines for…well, I think you'd be better off seeing this for yourself." With that, Hirondelle moved out of the doorway, waving one arm for the Guardian to follow him in. "The report's on the terminal."

Phantom dropped into the nearby chair, wheeling himself over to the terminal, and he quickly looked over the file, shock evident on his features as he read the details of the incident that had Hirondelle so concerned. "And this occurred yesterday afternoon?"

Hirondelle nodded. "Neige would have had this to me last night if it weren't for the state of the city in the wake of Guardian Fefnir's actions. That he'd taken an entire company out of the city seems to have rattled quite a few of the higher-ups."

"How did you get this?" Phantom asked. "I can understand that operatives are able to get a lot of information that wouldn't normally be available to the public, but this…" The Reploids shook his head, pulling his helmet off. "This unit is military. No one else would have been out there, out where I said the base was," and that Phoenix had told Fefnir worried him some, "so civilian and city maintenance units wouldn't have known about this. Not in this amount of detail."

Hirondelle smiled. "The operative that gave that report is none other than PZ-153."

Phantom turned around, staring incredulously at Hirondelle. "You joke."

"No, I don't," he said, smile unfading. "She's one of _three_ PZs that are working as Resistance agents."

Black eyes locked on Hirondelle for a long moment, then broke away. "Hard to believe you snuck three under my nose like that."

"Best way to keep someone like us from knowing that we're being spied on is to hide the operatives in plain sight." Hirondelle moved closer, pointing to a block of text. "What do you make of this part, though?"

"For that level of destruction, for him to have done that kind of damage on his own? It'd have required his Armored Phenomenon, probably with his fire modification chip." Phantom frowned. "He's really not taking Levi's disappearance well."

"Not at all, though his orders that they were not to fire until fired upon came as a bit of a surprise."

Phantom nodded. "Surprisingly enough, he's actually still sticking to military protocol there. I'm surprised, though. If he believes that we're Maverick, he's sending quite a few units into a fray they're not likely to survive," and he could see why it would have caused such an uproar in the upper echelon. "We need to move our attack up."

"You think so?" Hirondelle dropped into a nearby chair. "What makes you say that?"

"This is Fefnir we're talking about. Harpy told me that he thought the Judges Maverick for passing the Order of Retirement against me. That he would say something like that on a communications channel that could have been linked into? He's willing to throw a lot of rules out the window just to make sure he gets his point across." More than a few of the FJ units had gotten on Fefnir's bad side, learning very quickly—and firsthand—why Fefnir was viewed as such a threat on the field of battle. "If he's allowed to leave his quarters at all in the next few days, he may start looking for other locations like the facility he attacked," and that said nothing of what Hanumachine would do, having been on-site himself. "I'd rather not have him discover this base, even if Master Zero and Father _are_ here."

"I'll get in touch with Master X and Lady Ciel," Hirondelle said. "Thirty minutes?"

"That will be fine," Phantom said, standing. "Bring a copy of the report."

* * *

><p>For once, Blues was (somewhat) idle. Granted, he was inspecting his variable system and pondering one of the cutters and its need of a sharper blade, but really, this sort of maintenance wasn't necessary at the moment. Either way, though, he was seated comfortably on the couch Elec brought with him, taking up almost two thirds of it with the way he was lounging. Rock was in the room as well. He'd pulled the box of parts from under Blues' bed, prompting the older Robot Master to remember that oh, yes, he <em>did <em>need to get rid of that, didn't he?

Now, the smaller unit was going through them, unwrapping the parts to see what was in there, to see what was usable.

Human children cried to their parents for toys. Young Robot Masters built their own toys: that was half the fun. He'd scattered quite a few of the swatches of cloth across the floor, though, and really, when he was done making whatever it was he was going to construct, he'd have quite a mess to clean up.

When X messaged for Blues to come to Cervau's lab, his head lifted, but Rock continued digging through the box, completely clueless. He did look up when Blues closed his variable system up and stood, however.

The two units were en route to Cerveau's lab within ten seconds.

Zero and the three Guardians were already in Cerveau's lab, helping Hirondelle reorient one of the larger viewscreens and getting a number of chairs ready. While they weren't expecting the entire base to be in the room, it would help to have more than enough seats.

Especially with the news Neige had sent.

Harpuia looked up as Rock and Blues entered the room. "Hi, uncles!" he called out.

Zero froze mid-step, eyes turning to the door and the Robot Masters standing there.

Blues barely even faltered, though there was a moment's hesitation in his movement. He turned his head then, though, and entered the room, moving to stand on the side of the room opposite Zero: indeed, it was the furthest he could get from the android without just going back downstairs.

Rock wasn't clinging on Blues like he had been before his memory restoration, and he actually did smile in greeting toward Phantom. "Do you know what happened?" Why they'd been summoned here?

"We'll explain shortly," Phantom said, moving for the little unit and hugging him. "How are you doing?"

"Blues," X said, half-floating into the room, Ciel and Milan following close behind, "I didn't ask for Rock to be here for this."

Once Ciel noticed X talking to the elder Robot Master, she quickly moved for the other side of the room, dropping into one of the chairs and curling up against Milan once he'd taken a seat next to her.

"You did not," Blues affirmed, his facial expression unreadable as Rock suddenly looked a bit uncomfortable.

X frowned. "I told you when I contacted you that this had to do with the attack on the city. Do we really need to have him here for this?" With his mind so young, so much of war already part of his life?

Phantom stood from where he was by Rock, worried both by Rock's sudden discomfort and his father's tone. "I don't understand, Father. Why would it be bad for Uncle Rock to be here? I mean, this is a planning session, a discussion. Wouldn't his input be valuable?" even if Rock didn't speak often about his war memories.

"There were ten wars and countless smaller uprisings and battles that broke out during the course of the Wily Wars. Rock is the only unit that participated in every single incident. It would be folly to _not _include him in this. That is my judgment." Blues was frowning now, though his voice remained calm. What Rock could and couldn't hear wasn't X's decision, not by any stretch of the imagination.

"I would think you'd see it better for him to prevent him from having to fight," X argued, "but if you want him here, I'm not going to argue." Arguing never worked with Blues anyway.

"It's okay, X," Rock said, his voice a bit soft. "I'm here because I want to be."

"You said something about a message from Neige?" Ciel asked, though she was still pulled close to Milan, as if for protection.

"I did," Hirondelle replied with a nod. "It seems like the remaining Guardian is not responding well to being the sole survivor of Guardian Phantom's…efforts."

"How so?" Ciel asked.

"Let's get everyone settled," Phantom cut off the line of questioning, motioning to the security team at the door to come in and sit down.

Rock settled into a chair at the same time that Blues sat down, even if his posture was a bit rigid. The smaller unit's gaze flickered around the units in the room—they'd be hard-pressed to make this _less_ tense with the mix of people in here.

Once everyone had taken a seat, save for himself and Hirondelle, Phantom opened the report document on the left half of the screen, certain highlighted sections displaying in larger boxes on the right of the screen. "What you're seeing here is a detailed report from one of my own units, serving under Guardian Fefnir. The assignment, as you can see, was to attack the supposed Resistance base located at the coordinates I provided before my departure from Neo Arcadia. From what PZ-153 provided about the incident and the volatility of both the situation and my brother, I wanted to suggest moving the attack on Neo Arcadia up."

"If at all possible, we'd like to cut down on the chance of Guardian Fefnir having time to set up a second strike," Hirondelle continued. "Since Guardian Phantom was able to locate our base between acquired coordinates and orbital surveillance, we feel that it would be in the best interests to not give the city time to find this base and launch another offensive."

Phantom nodded. "If at all possible, I'd suggest launching the offensive tomorrow afternoon."

"Tomorrow afternoon?" Leviathan managed to keep the surprise from her voice, even as she leaned forward to scrutinize the imagery on the screen. There was a _massive_ crater where, Leviathan surmised, ruined buildings had been, and that spoke nothing of the smaller craters pockmarking the area. A twinge of guilt—and pain—shot through her systems, knowing what their brother had to be going through.

"The sooner, the better," Zero agreed. "Although I'm curious to know how anyone could have done this much damage. Even with the armor upgrades that X and I used during the Maverick Wars, this is…" and Zero indicated toward the screen. "This looks like a tactical missile strike."

"Normally, no, a Reploid cannot do this kind of damage. This scope…" Leviathan sighed, "Fefnir was in his Armored Phenomenon form during this attack. There's no other way he could have done that much damage."

"Armored Phenomenon?" Zero asked.

"They're modified armor sets with increased capabilities based on our fighting specialties," Harpuia explained. "Phantom has a blade specialist setup, and mine is equipped for aerial combat."

"Fefnir's Armored Phenomenon is a tank in every sense of the word," Phantom explained. "His defense parameters are nearly tripled from his base armor, his attacks are upgraded from a pair of arm cannons to four massive buster cannons, all of which can be equipped with fire element attack chips, and he operates as both a ground-to-air strike unit and a devastating ground-based unit," although the destruction he was capable of causing was more than evident in the images provided in the report.

"So the Phenomenon forms are basically alternate armor sets," and Zero frowned more at that, "but with massive upgrades and amplifications to your combat capabilities?"

"That's right," Leviathan nodded. "Using it expends a lot of energy, but there aren't many Reploids that can rightfully stand against us when we take that route." Really, not counting X and Zero, the Four Guardians were one another's foils.

"So, if we do go ahead and move this attack to tomorrow," Faucon said, "we're dealing with a Guardian likely in Armored Phenomenon form, whatever remains of the Pantheon and Golem forces if Copy X has even taken them off the streets after the massacre during Master Zero's extraction, and a dozen lieutenants under the command of Guardian Fefnir as he is."

"Indeed we are," Hirondelle said, nodding.

"That's putting us into a very direct, very dangerous line of fire," Faucon said. "I fully understand the ideals of revolution and the concept of one's life being a willing price to bring about change, but this seems a bit extreme."

"You've got a plan to keep our troops out of the line of fire," X noted. Hirondelle made a great spy, but during planning meetings, he had a few tells, and there was one major one being given right now.

"In fact, I do," the unit said, smirking. "Our main concerns are getting into the city, subduing Guardian Fefnir, and dealing with the military. From there, it's just a matter of getting into Neo Arcadia Tower to capture Copy X and, if necessary, the Judges." He motioned to Phantom. "Infiltration won't be a problem: Guardian Phantom has already provided updated maps of the city to facilitate unmonitored movements. We have units capable of going against the city's remaining Guardian. The military won't pose a problem as long as we have the Robot Masters working with us," and Hirondelle looked to Blues at that.

Blues' head ticked to the side slightly. "You wish for us to reroute the troops, then. We will have complete control of the network that Neo Arcadia runs off of, so that will not be a problem." Everything went through that network; that was one of the city's greatest weaknesses. That would be another thing to bring up once they had it back under their control.

"Speaking of the city troops," Milan said, "what of the coding that caused the mess topside when we retrieved Master Zero and Blues?"

Hirondelle had called two of the programmers that Phantom evacuated from Neo Arcadia, Jacinthe and Noyer, up to the meeting and Noyer spoke up, his voice a bit quiet, the timidity of the city still well-established with him. "We've gone over the Pantheon coding extensively," combed through it several times over, "and we've patched everything that we could." Noyer hesitated a moment, then ventured, "I've heard that the Robot Masters are adept coders. If it wouldn't be too much trouble…"

"I can review the coding and make any necessary changes before the raid begins," Blues responded. Judging by the tilt of his head, he was looking to Noyer, though honestly, it was hard to tell.

Hirondelle nodded. "As for the bulk of the Resistance's security force, it would be better for us to ensure that the civilians in the near vicinity of the Tower are off the streets and protected in the residential districts." Far from where the bulk of the fighting was going on—the civilian units would be safest there. "Master X, your thoughts?"

"I think it is wise to get the civilians out of the direct line of fire. Do we have enough contacts within the city to manage a covert evacuation?" X said. "If I'm understanding your plans so far, getting the civilians to safety would actually begin before the attack force lands in the city."

"Exactly," Hirondelle said. "The security team, as Faucon noted, is not equipped to handle the brunt of the Neo Arcadian forces, even with Blues rerouting troops. Since the goal of the attack is not only to take back the city, but to do so as quickly and efficiently as possible, the security team would better serve the cause by clearing the way for the teams that will follow."

"Okay, I'm a little concerned here," Zero said. "You're basically hinging the success of the plan on five Robot Masters, an android, three Reploids, and a Cyber Elf."

"Technically," X commented, "this is five times the force we sent out on standard missions during the Maverick Wars."

"True, but the missions we ran were regaining control of facilities, of buildings, not entire cities, and certainly not a city the size of Neo Arcadia," Zero fired back.

"Neo Arcadia's smaller than Eurasia," X offered.

Zero frowned deeply at that. "That wasn't funny."

"I wasn't trying to be amusing. I was making note that we've handled bigger with smaller forces," X stated.

"Except the Eurasia mission was a suicide run in a dilapidated cruiser against a space station rigged to blow and teeming with active virus nanites," and the blond looked upset now.

"And we still managed to succeed," X said. "Look at the end of the Elf Wars. You and I alone were enough to take down Omega wired into the Harbinger mech _and_ using Dark Elf's powers as an amplifier. Ten units will be more than enough."

"Besides," Rock said, shifting to sit a bit straighter in his seat, "It's not like you're adding any inexperienced units. We can do a lot to stifle their ability to coordinate and move troops around, which will do a _lot_ to make their resistance fall flat. And even if we do meet units face-to-face, we all have combat experience; it's not like we'll freeze up if someone points a buster in our direction."

It took a great deal of restraint for a smirk to _not_ find its way to Blues' face.

X's hand was covering his mouth almost immediately, simultaneously hiding the smile that had popped up at Rock's comment and keeping himself from chiding Rock. The young unit had not been awake during the escape from Neo Arcadia with Zero and Blues, so it wasn't like he knew that he was mildly insulting the Resistance's co-commander.

And she certainly looked upset at the comment, but she was able to keep quiet. Though just _barely_. That had stung a great deal.

Zero nodded, though hesitantly, agreeing with Rock. Combat experience did account for a lot, and each of the Robot Masters certainly brought a new element onto the battlefield. "Part of my concern," Zero said, looking to Blues and Rock after a moment, "is that neither of you are armored. Combat experience is all well and good, but without protection over vital systems and components, you're a walking target."

Blues actually shrugged slightly in response to Zero's concern. "I've done worse."

Rock rolled his eyes for a moment, a slightly hopeless smirk crossing his features: Blues certainly _had_ done worse. "I know I'm not armored," Rock turned to look to Zero, "But this won't have been the first time I've been on the battlefield without armor. Plus, Ice, Shadow, and Elec will be there. They can provide cover." And quite well, particularly Ice.

"And you'd be able to have everything ready and everyone prepped by tomorrow?" Zero asked.

Zero could see his reflection dancing across Blues' lenses when the Robot Master turned his head to look at him. "Will _you?_"

Zero cocked a smirk. "The Zeroth have been training, and they're performing quite well when sparring, so they'll be ready. Don't worry about my team."

X rolled his eyes. "As long as everyone can get their teams together and we can be ready to launch, everything should be all clear for the—" And X stopped mid-sentence, a slight groan escaping him, as his hand reached up and clutched at his chest.

"Master X?" Faucon asked. "What's wrong?"

Everyone in the room tensed at X's motions, Leviathan glancing at Harpuia, then Phantom: had they seen Father do this before?

Rock was up and out of his chair when X didn't immediately respond, his brow furrowed as he activated scan modes, reaching out over his link with X, requesting for a more active connection.

At the same instant, Blues, Elec, and Ice all sent the same request.

X's breathing was a bit erratic, his hand holding tight against his robes. The burning feeling behind the hand was something he'd never felt before, couldn't identify, and it worried him all the more because it wasn't like there was a core crystal that could have been burning out. Hesitating for only a second, he verified the links with his siblings, reaching out to them for support, for stability, and—hopefully—for answers.

Harpuia and Zero were moving to X's side almost immediately, Zero reaching out tentatively and resting a hand near X's shoulder. "X, what's wrong?"

"Don't know," he managed out, his voice strained. The burning sensation was centered right around where his power core would have been, had he still been in his physical body, and for a moment, he wondered if this is what the attacks were like for Blues, his eyes glancing up at the elder Lightbot for only a moment before he lurched forward a bit, the pain magnifying, and Zero's hand passed clean through his shoulder.

Worry mounted in Zero's systems when X's shoulder tried to reform, frazzled as it was by Zero's hand passing through, and failed to hold its cohesion.

Rock was to X's side, Blues following close behind, and all four of X's siblings were sending reassurances, but the data Rock was getting from X was… "It feels like…" His brow knitted as he looked back to Blues, as though to say, _it feels like one of _your_ attacks._

There was a soft, but high-pitched sound coming from behind the two elder Light siblings, and in a channel of light, Elec materialized, his face tight with concern as he strode forward. He didn't even need to ask Rock and Blues to move aside for him, and he knelt down beside X, waiting just a moment for Zero to back off from the Cyber Elf, then formed the field around his body that would allow X to properly interact with somebody. In as much pain as X was, Elec had to be gentle as he could, but he pulled the younger unit to him, his brow furrowing in further concern at the state of X's shoulder, how it wasn't rematerializing properly.

Phantom pulled Leviathan close, holding her, trying to comfort her despite the fact that he knew as much as anyone else about what was going on with their father.

Another pained whimper escaped X and he leaned into Elec's embrace, trying to figure out why he hurt so much. Though the burning sensation was starting to pass, there was a tightness in his chest he couldn't explain, a feeling of something crushing him from the inside out.

"Does anyone know what's wrong?" Harpuia asked, looking to Elec and then Blues.

Blues knelt down and placed one hand on Elec's shoulder to gain the field that he was generating and, a little hesitantly, he placed the other arm along X's back, in a loose embrace. He and the others were still scanning, still querying X's systems, but…

"X," Blues began, his voice coming out softly despite the tinge of authority seeping into his question, "Do you still have sensory ties to the body you were shunted from?"

"If I did, this would be the first—" and for the second time, X was cut off, eyes going wide as his hand moved for his throat, and despite X lacking the need to breathe, he sounded as if he'd just started choking.

And then his data _really_ started to fragment, his form losing a lot of its cohesion, and his legs were the first thing to fully break apart.

Zero had to pull Harpuia back from his father, the elder AXR all but lunging for him in panic.

"X," Blues said, his voice still oddly calm. "If you can, I need you to sever any connection you may have to your body. Pain sensors, status indicators, cut it _all._" If what they were feeling was what they thought they were feeling…

Elec's grip on X tightened some when he began choking, the Harmony now an agitated clutter of sound in the back of his mind.

"Is someone attacking him?" Rock's voice was oddly quiet and a little tremulous, but he was hanging back just a little bit, not that that stopped the little unit from continually scanning the youngest of the Light children.

"Don't…have…sensory net," X managed, cringing as his left arm fragmented, forcing more energy through his body to try and stabilize. "I can't…feel a connection. Wouldn't know how…how to break away…and if that's…the case…if…it'd kill me." Speaking was nearly impossible, his voice coming out as if he were talking through a mouthful of gravel.

"X, make yourself smaller," Rock said suddenly, his eyes having widened as even more of X's body began fragmenting. "You can't stay materialized at that size," and really, while he was under duress like that, X should be doing everything he could to reduce the strain on himself.

"Can't focus," X replied.

"Try," Zero emphasized, pushing Harpuia toward his siblings before moving closer to X. "If there's anything you can do to stabilize and stop whatever is happening, do it."

"Don't know—"

"Don't give me that crap," Zero said, almost glaring at the elf. "I don't know what Rock's talking about you being smaller, but you need to get your body back into some semblance of…not this."

X shuddered a bit, leaning into Blues, sending a short '_I'm sorry_' over the link with his brothers before letting himself succumb to Cyberspace.

Despite the electric field surrounding Blues and Elec, Zero's eyes widened in panic when he saw X starting to go transparent, and he lunged forward, hand grazing X's remaining good arm just before the elf vanished.

"X!" Rock also started forward, panic saturating his signal, but the scarce second it took for Rock to cross the distance to where X had been was far too long: the Cyber Elf was gone.

The other two Robot Masters were startled, and it took Elec a moment to even remember to dissipate the field, to make the area immediately around him safe for other units to approach, but Blues hardly noticed. His gaze remained focused on where X had been, his mind racing as he calculated and recalculated, lining up the data, the evidence, and drawing conclusions, looking for the most likely scenario and, most importantly, the next step to take. That felt like an attack, like one of his own core attacks. It would not be presumptuous to assume that something happened to X's body, even if this data-body shouldn't still have a sensory link to it.

A cold anger swept over Blues' systems like a razor's edge. Like one last nail in the coffin, he knew that the siege and overthrowing of Neo Arcadia could not come soon enough. They'd had their fun, their dirty tactics. Two could play at that game.

He soared over the cacophony on the Harmony, reaching outward and linking up to the satellites once again, sending a signal, a command, an _order._

If they wanted to push, that was fine. They could push all they wanted. But he? No. He'd see to it that by the end of that day, Neo Arcadia would be trampled underfoot.

When Zero let Harpuia go, Leviathan threaded her arms around him, her shoulders hunched in, just as disturbed as the others in the room to see X in such pain, to fracture so, then to disappear entirely? She figured he was a Cyber Elf of some sort, even before she was told as much. Cyberspace was the most obvious answer to the question of where X had just gone to, but for him to be under such duress, to be in such pain where he could barely form words? And then to disappear?

Worried didn't _begin_ to cover what her emotional matrices were producing. She'd never felt so, so _helpless_ before, so utterly useless, and what could she do? What could any of them do, except wait?

Harpuia wrapped his arms around Leviathan, holding back from saying anything, offering what comfort he could. He was beyond worried, beyond scared, for their father, but until they could figure out what happened and where he went, it was the people here that he could do something for.

Phantom moved to join the hug, trying not to scream, wanting with every part of his being to find out where Shadow was and hit the city _now_. Already down by one unit because something had happened in that city, something that, from Blues' questioning, had to do with his father's body, Phantom was almost trembling with unbridled rage.

The Resistance members hadn't moved since X's attack began, their own minds spinning with questions, and all of them looked as equally perturbed by the situation.

Ciel leaned against Milan, mind turning over the attack, poring over the details. For him to be in so much pain, to be reacting like a Cyber Elf that had been running off of their core crystal when he had no crystal to speak of…

Milan wrapped an arm around Ciel, whispering words of comfort to her. Given time, he was sure that X would be fine.

Zero's brow was furrowed, going over the memory file that had restored when he'd come into contact with X. There'd been a low-level discharge, though Zero couldn't tell if it was from X or Elec, but the memory playing in his mind's eye was one he _needed_ to pay attention to.

A century ago, he'd willingly split from his body to be uploaded to the copy body he was now in, and for the few seconds it took to make the transfer, he'd been in a form surprisingly similar to X's own. Hyperfocusing on those sparse seconds, he could feel the pull of something, and he really hoped that it was the Cyberspace realm that X referred to when it came to recharging.

A look quite akin to '_There_ we go' crossed Zero's features a fraction of a second before his eyes grayed out and he crumpled.

Elec just barely reached out to catch Zero's now-unconscious body in time, blinking at how comparatively light the unit was before shifting him and settling him on his side, in a relaxed, laying position, even if he was on the floor. He leaned over Zero, both eyes greying out for a moment as he activated his own scan mode, his systems querying Zero's for status.

He was offline.

Blues startled when Zero suddenly slumped, seemingly registering their close proximity for the first time and immediately, he was on his feet and a few steps back, his body language tense and drawn. From behind him, Shadow materialized and stepped around him and Rock. He knelt down at Zero's side, trying his own scans when Elec's were coming up empty: he had additional permissions the Lightbots did not.

* * *

><p>It took a moment for Zero to orient himself, pushing himself to his feet and wavering a little, before taking a chance to look around, surprised by the lush greenery he found surrounding him. Was this what Cyberspace looked like, or had X made it look like this to make it feel more welcoming when he returned here to charge? Blinking, he noticed a small blip in his vision, surprised that he still had access to a peripheral menu here. Once he looked over the small note, he shrugged and verified the repair. Whatever it was that Cyberspace's energy was trying to fix was probably something that desperately needed the attention.<p>

"Zero?" a voice called out.

Turning, blond hair whipping around with the motion, Zero smiled. "X," he said, walking over to the unit. "Thought I'd find you here. You okay?"

"Still hurts," X said, motioning to his throat, "but better, yes."

"It still hurts because you're still allowing yourself to maintain the tether."

X tilted his head to the side. "Tether?"

Zero nodded. "Part of the body jumping process I went through involved breaking my connection tether to my old body. You have to do the same for yourself now, especially if something _did_ happen to your body and what just went on in the lab was the result."

"You say you broke the tether, and yet you look like that?" X said.

Zero looked down at himself, stopping for a moment to admire the red and gold robe he wore. "What do you mean?"

X moved forward, brushing his hand along the pointed tips of Zero's helmet, having to reach up now that Zero was at his original height, nearly a full head taller than him. "Like you did a century ago, before the transfer."

"You'd expect my core self to reflect the body I took?" Zero asked, then shook his head. "Regardless, we need to break your tether. It'll probably require you staying in Cyberspace to keep from taxing your systems, but at least you'll be safe until we can do something about getting you a new body."

"You're going to take the city without me?" X asked, worried.

"I'm here for you _and _the Resistance, so, yes, I am going to help them take the city tomorrow. From there, we can work on having a new body built for you, give you a new one to tether to." Zero reached out, pressed a hand against X's chest. "Your tether is here, focused here. Concentrate on that and you'll feel it. Once you can sense it, know where it is, you have to break away from it."

"Zero…"

"X, trust me. I had to do this without a guide when I made the transfer, had no one telling me what to do. Just focus," and his hands moved to X's shoulders.

Closing his eyes, X focused his attention on his chest, on where the pain had originated during the attack, and he felt something there.

Noticing the way X's brow furrowed, Zero was sure he'd felt the tether. "Found it?"

"I think so," X said.

"It's just like disconnecting a link," Zero said. "Once you've broken that, I need you to show me around."

"What for?" X said, focusing on the pull of energy he'd never really noticed before.

"We need to go see what happened to your body. And you need to teach me how to eject from Cyberspace. I kinda made a leap of faith here," Zero admitted.

"Okay," X said, breathing a sigh of relief when the tether was broken, the pain immediately vanishing. "How did…why didn't you tell me to do this in the lab?"

"Didn't remember until after you'd vanished," the blond admitted. "Now, to Sanctum Yggdrasil."

* * *

><p>Once Shadow confirmed that Zero was indeed offline, Cerveau stepped forward and directed the Wilybot to get Zero onto one of the exam tables. Upon closer examination, Cerveau was able to ascertain that while Zero was unresponsive, there wasn't anything physically wrong with the body: nothing had shorted out, and there was no damage anywhere that would prevent him from coming online.<p>

Leviathan was quiet for a long time, letting what just happened sink in, letting it process, then considering their position and what they needed to do. When she spoke again, she had the same tone of voice she used when on official business, when dealing with her own troops or with her siblings as one Guardian to another. "We need real-time satellite imagery of Neo Arcadia to track how they're moving their patrols through the city. We'll need to split into teams. The security team, it was decided, is going to get the civilians evacuated, or at least cordoned to a secure portion of the city, out of our path of fire. Someone needs to contend with Fefnir, and to keep him occupied until we can get at Copy X and restrain him and the Judges," although, if they could get Fef to defect to their side, all the better. "We'll need a third team to storm the tower and confront the Copy and the Judges directly. And, I think a fourth team, of Robot Masters, to deal with the network, would be our best bet." She turned to look to Harpuia and Phantom: did their evaluations come up along the same line?

Harpuia nodded. "That sounds good," though his mind certainly wasn't focused on the coming attack. Right now, he wanted to know what had happened to his father and his commander.

"As much as I hate to admit it, Fefnir will likely use his Phenomenon in the city," Phantom said. "Harpuia and I are going to have to take him on."

"It'd be best, then," Harpuia said with a nod, "if Levi were to be part of the team going after the tower," and he held his sister closer. "You won't be able to combat Fefnir as you are, and your Phenomenon is set for aquatic combat."

Leviathan sighed, but Harpuia was right: she was _useless_ on dry land if their Armored Phenomenon forms were required. That'd always been an upsetting reality for her, even if, should there be a marine strike, she was the only one of her siblings that could fight underwater.

Harpy was lucky he could fly: he could fight wherever.

Blues was pondering the report again, one of his processors focusing on the here and now and the others, on X. "Shadow and I will handle the network. Rock, I want you with Elec and Ice. Head to the tower. With any luck, the Guardians will finish their battle and meet you there." Although, if all they could do was hold their brother off, then the Robot Masters would have to enter the tower on their own.

Rock turned to Leviathan then, nodding, "And if Leviathan comes with us to the tower, we may have an easier time getting in. Even if she's believed Maverick, the city will be in a state of total confusion and the soldiers are trained to follow orders." So to have a _general_, even one that was recently removed from service, barking orders at them when they were so unsure to begin with?

Rock hoped they wouldn't have to fight too much at all.

Hirondelle looked over the report, considering. "We'd probably be better off moving up to my office," he said. "We're going to need maps and get everyone's routes figured out." He looked to Zero and Shadow. "Will you be staying here with your brother?"

Shadow nodded shortly from where he was already settled into a chair beside Zero's table. "I can link in to Blues for a feed on what you're discussing in your office," and ask questions through the unit if needed, so there was no need for him to come with as well.

Phantom was the first to break from the group, already out the door and on his way to Hirondelle's room on the second level.

Harpuia sighed. "He looks ready to hit something," although he could relate.

Leviathan nodded even as she nudged Harpuia toward the door. "I think that right now, we could all do with a punching bag."

Blues and Rock were the last two to leave the room, distracted as they were with the conversation going on in the links between the Robot Masters. They, too, did eventually leave the room, Rock pausing to take one last glance back at Zero and Shadow before turning the corner and following Blues—and the others—to Hirondelle's office.

"If anything," Harpuia offered as they moved for the access ladder, "we could do right by the Lieutenant Commander and run cadences and spar before we pod for the night," and two of them were going to be camped out in Cerveau's lab to ensure they were all charged before tomorrow's mission.

Leviathan nodded her agreement. "You and Phantom will have your hands full with Fefnir," and there was a trickle of regret in her voice that she couldn't help them with it.

Fefnir's Armored Phenomenon form was a _beast._

Phantom had already called up maps of the city by the time everyone had gotten to Hirondelle's room, going over them through manual controls as well as via the link, little dots popping up over all three levels of the map.

"Setting up landing points?" Hirondelle asked, noticing that there were four different color sets being used.

"The lower level entrance points will be for the security team," Phantom explained, pointing to the green dots. "I'll establish routes up to the residential district for the teams to follow. The red dots here are my and Harpuia's starting positions. Since we'll be coming in after the net's under Robot Master control, we can touch down at the Trans Server here. The blue dot here," and he pointed to a section of the manufacturing district, "isn't heavily patrolled, so Blues and Shadow can teleport in here. With the city as it is, we don't have protections against the teleportation methods they're using, so it won't be a problem coming down here. The orange dots here will be where the rest of the Robot Masters and Leviathan start off. There is a Trans Server platform here, so Levi will have a route in right by where the tower siege team will land." Phantom looked up to Blues. "Do you concur with troop placement?"

Blues took his time to look over the map of Neo Arcadia and match it up with what he remembered of the city. He did eventually nod, however. "The security team should enter first and take some time to get as many civilians as they can out of harm's way without drawing attention. Once we teleport in and take control of the network, they'll know." So the second Blues and Shadow teleported in, their clock would be ticking down.

"I still have to go over routes to the surface from here, but they should be dropping in about twenty to thirty minutes before Blues and Shadow." Phantom pondered the maps for a minute.

"Think that will be enough time to get to the surface?" Harpuia asked. "You're giving them routes that you're fast at getting through, but they're not built like you."

Phantom leaned over the map, toggling the view to zoom on the section of map leading from Sub Arcadia to the main part of the city. "The majority of the routes take me five minutes. I'd give them fifteen, then?"

"That sounds reasonable," Faucon said. "It'll give us time in case something comes up," not that it would, "and link up with Neige's people on the surface."

"So we launch our teams forty-five minutes before the Robot Masters teleport in," Hirondelle noted. "I'll have to get a message out to Neige tonight to have her teams ready."

"Once we give the all-clear over the net," Phantom said, "I want all armed security personnel to move from the residential district to form up a perimeter around Neo Arcadia tower."

Harpuia frowned, leaning over the maps for a second. "Uncle Blues, I have a question about what you did on the network during your initial departure from the city. With you asserting control over the networks, would you be able to get the mechaniloids off the field? The fewer units we have to combat, the easier it will be to get to the tower."

Blues was leaning down slightly, scrutinizing the city maps from behind his sunglasses, a slight frown on his face. He didn't look up at Harpuia, though his unseen gaze did flicker upward for an instant when he was addressed. "We will remove the mechaniloid units from the battlefield from the outset," so the little ones didn't have to get involved. "The troops will be easy to reroute as well, even if it is the same trick a second time around." Honestly, Blues didn't see them being any better at discerning the authenticity of their orders this time around, and with the other Robot Master units here, too?

They'd be covered from every angle.

"Actually," Canard said, looking at the map now that Phantom had restored it to the full city view, "if we have units that can teleport inside the Eden Dome without using the Trans Servers, why are you positioning them so far away from the tower?"

"I don't want to drop right onto Neo Arcadia Tower. A direct attack on that location, counting the fact that Fefnir likely thinks us Maverick and that Copy X is our father, will only hinder our efforts."

Harpuia nodded. "It's not like we're starting from the outer sectors of the city. We'll be dropping in within reasonable distance, and this will allow us the chance to keep any combat maneuvers away from the residential districts. The drop points are all in areas that will pull the military away from the citizens."

"And keeping the citizens safe is priority," Blues finished, his voice almost a hum as he continued scrutinizing the map, inwardly satisfied that these preventative steps were keeping the First Law nice and quiet.

"You'll have the edited emergency response signal coding uploading soon after landing, correct?" Hirondelle asked.

Rock was standing a bit on his toes, not because he was having trouble seeing the maps, but because he was agitated. This siege, and what happened to X, and then Zero collapsing…

The little unit looked up to Hirondelle though, and answered his question. "We'll queue the upload to begin immediately after we seize control of the network. It'll be issued to the units before they even have a chance to mobilize."

Phantom was going over the maps and routes in his head, figuring out the best routes from the five Trans Servers to the surface. "I'll have the routes sent to the lead units within the next few hours," he said. "Hirondelle, you and Faucon figure out who is going to lead the five security teams."

Hirondelle looked at the map display for a moment, pointing to a single spot in the middle of the residential district. "What about sending my team in here?" he asked.

"On the surface?" Harpuia said. "Isn't that _not_ being a good covert agent?"

"Only if Neige doesn't have the platform secured beforehand. I'll let her know tonight."

"Part of me still wants to know how you've been getting secure communications in and out of the city without being intercepted," Phantom said.

"Remember how I told you there are three of your Zan'ei units working with us? You may not have trained them all personally but they are still _good_ at what they do, and that's not getting caught working for the 'enemies of the city'." Hirondelle smirked. "It wasn't an easy task to enlist them, I'll let you know that much."

"I wouldn't expect my units to just change sides like that," Phantom said. "You gave them good reason, though, if they did." And he left it at that. "So, why do you want to be topside so early?"

"There are a few hackers in the city's Resistance division. There are also city residents that are going to be somewhere that _isn't_ the residential district. We need to make sure what agents we can contact know that they've got to get the people around them to safety," and Hirondelle nodded as Phantom set a sixth green marker on the surface of the city.

"Just how many of the citizens did you bring over to your cause in four years?" Harpuia asked.

Hirondelle answered with a simple smile, and nothing more.

* * *

><p>"So, is this what Cyberspace looked like when you first came here?" Zero asked, keeping pace with X.<p>

X shook his head. "No. Initially, it looked like a giant glowing motherboard, except in three dimensions, and I couldn't really find out how far it reached."

"So you designed all this?" Zero sounded incredulous.

"I actually spent the first three years after we sealed Dark Elf not knowing how to get out of here. I had nothing _but_ time on my hands and I wanted someplace that didn't look so…mechanical."

Zero looked around as they continued walking. "It's beautiful. Part of me wonders how it is you can keep going back to the wreck that is the real world when you've got this."

X motioned to the greenery that surrounded them, digital though it was. "This is my dream, Zero, my hope. This is what the world will come to look like again, given time, given our efforts. Given a chance to heal."

"And you know how to find your way between this world and the real world?" Zero asked. "How?"

"I lot of it is surprisingly intuitive, like I know where I'm going even if I'm not consciously aware of how I know." X's features darkened a bit. "It'll be a few more minutes before we get to Sanctum Yggdrasil."

"How are you feeling?" Zero asked.

"Could you stop asking that?" X said, almost whining. "That's the seventh time you've asked so far."

"I can't be worried about my friend?"

"There's a line between worried and paranoid," X shot back, "and you've long since crossed it."

"I'm worried with good reason, X," Zero replied. "I saw what you went through, followed you here, and found you _still_ in pain."

"You sound like Blues," X said, shoulders slumping a bit. "And Rock. And the rest of my siblings. You're all a bunch of worrywarts."

Zero rolled his eyes and groaned. "And there you go again with that whole 'you don't have to treat me like I matter' attitude. I thought you actually, I don't know, _valued_ _yourself_ as a person."

"I do," X argued.

"No, you see yourself as someone that's constantly getting in the way and inconveniencing the people around you. You refused to get a room in the base because you're a Cyber Elf, you have this whole issue with not being able to touch people but push them away when they're trying to help, and even now you're mad at me for being honestly concerned about you. X, everyone back at base likely thinks you _died_. Rock looked highly upset, your kids can't make heads or tails of what they saw, and even I'm still scratching my head. Okay, fine, you didn't know how to break the tether. We've fixed that. One problem down. Stop pushing us away when we're trying to do things to help you and treat you like one of us." Wasn't that what he had been so upset about when it came to the way the city was treating him?

X looked to the ground. "I'm sorry," he said quietly.

"Don't be sorry. Just take what I said to heart. We're worried, but we're worried with good reason. We all care about you, X. It's in the nature of those that care to act this way when someone is hurt." That unwavering concern was something that was almost synonymous with X during the Maverick Wars era, based on the memories he'd restored.

A heavy sigh, and X idled closer to Zero, letting the taller Cyber Elf wrap his arm around his shoulders. "I'm sorry. I just…I've spent so long being on my own, elevated to heights I never felt I deserved, that I'm…I'm not entirely used to people treating me like a person anymore."

Zero smiled, holding his friend tighter. "You're not alone anymore, X. You haven't been since Blues and I were retrieved from the city. You've got friends that are there for you, and after your little outburst at Blues, everyone at base knows that you're not this paragon they need to worship."

"I still don't know if I want to thank Menart for that or not," X said with a small laugh. "That could have been handled better."

"Well, at least I know that you weren't serious about abandoning your post as Neo Arcadia's leader."

"What do you mean?" X asked.

"That promise I made," Zero said. "The rest of that memory restored last night during my sleep cycle."

X smiled, truly smiled at that. "I guess it would be rude of me to step down if you're going to insist on keeping that promise."

"I'll serve as long as you'll have me, as soldier, protector, counselor, friend. I'll lead the city as long as I do so at your side. I'll help you make your dream the world's reality." Zero hugged X closer as he recited the final words of his century-old promise.

"And to think, you used to have a problem with being sentimental," X joked.

"We've all done things and acted out of line during our lives. Those parts of our pasts are probably better left there," Zero said with a shrug. "We've got a future to look forward to and hope to bring to the city, especially with your siblings helping."

X nodded. "A beacon of light in darkness that seemed endless."

"Now you're waxing poetic," Zero said, letting his arm drop from X's shoulder.

"Really?" X said, glaring at Zero even if he couldn't keep the smile from his face. "As much as you know not being able to touch people bothers me and now you won't hold me?"

"Sorry," Zero apologized, returning his arm to its spot around X's shoulders. "If something did happen to your body, you know I'm going to request that you stay out of this fight tomorrow."

"On what grounds?" X asked, looking a bit affronted by the suggestion.

"Well, on the grounds that I still legitimately outrank you, second body or lack of official organization aside," Zero stated. "That said, I don't want you putting yourself in any more danger than you already have. We've got…enough of a team to handle the city, and if you could have seen the look on Rock's face when you vanished, X…"

He never wanted to see that look on the child's face again.

"Well, for what it's worth, I'm sorry. I just didn't think that going full elf would have helped any. The pain was…"

Zero nodded. "It's alright. He'll be happy to know that you're alright once we get back."

X sighed, eyes turning downward again. "We're here."

Zero stopped. "Okay, so now comes the fun part."

"Fun?" X asked.

"I don't know how to get out of here," Zero admitted.

"Oh," and X moved to stand in front of Zero, taking the elf's hands. "You…you should be able to feel though me how I do this," and he closed his eyes, reaching out with his own energy and establishing a link with the real world.

"It feels…like an upload. Or a download." There wasn't really a difference in the two forms of data transfer save for the direction of information.

"It is," and a line of light formed behind X. "And there's the link point."

"And you just…pass through?" Zero asked.

"Did you feel how I made the connection?" X asked. "And yes, you just walk through, once it's established into a full gateway."

"I'll have to try it again later," Zero said. "For now, let's just check in and see what happened."

X was the first out of the portal, and he reeled backwards almost as soon as he'd gotten a good look at the Sanctum, a shocked cry flying from his lips as he took in the state of the room.

And the gaping hole in the pod where his body had once rested, the final seal on Dark Elf.

Zero was at X's side the minute he stepped out of the portal, looking around, though his eyes turned almost immediately to the body slumped at the base of the…tree? "This is Yggdrasil?"

Mutely, X nodded, taking in the brown and black remnants of the leaves decorating the nine boughs, almost pointedly refusing to look at the base of the tree. "It was the seal on your daughter. Until we could cure her, we caged her. There were ten seals programmed or placed over her prison," and he pointed upwards. "The first nine seals were programmed to connect to the holographic displays. Green leaves would mean she was still held behind them. Yellow meant we would have had to check the seal for weaknesses and correct them."

"But the 'leaves' are all dead," Zero noted. "Someone stole my daughter. _Again_," and there was an edge of malice in his voice.

X nodded, turning to Zero and wrapping his arms around the taller elf, still refusing to look to the final seal.

Zero's eyes turned back to the body at the base of the tree, hesitating only for a moment before moving toward it, breaking X's hold on him.

"Zero, please…" X said.

Zero turned, argument dying on his lips when he noticed that X's legs were already fragmenting. "Weren't you charging in Cyberspace?" he asked, panic edging into his voice.

"I was. Why? I'm…" and X looked down then. After a moment, his eyes turned back up, worry in the emerald orbs. "I can't force cohesion," he admitted, his own voice tremulous.

"Back in Cyberspace," Zero said. "Now!"

"Zero…"

"I know how to get back! Go!" he ordered. "Damn it, X, something's wrong! Just listen to me! I'll be back in a minute!"

X stepped back, nodding after a moment and allowing himself to fall back into the embrace of the digital sanctuary.

Once he was sure that X had left, he moved for the form at Yggdrasil's roots, growling a bit as he tried to turn the body over and realized that he couldn't touch it.

The armor he recognized all too well, though the hole bored into the center of the torso was a sight he never wanted to see. Coolant and lubricants had pooled beneath the body, and he stumbled back a bit, moving clear of the carmine stain.

Whoever had done this hadn't only destroyed X's core, which explained the chest pains, but had also decapitated the body of the legendary Hunter.

Standing up, Zero cast an angry glare at the destroyed body before reaching out for the pulse of Cyberspace and relinquished himself to its grip.

Right now, X needed him. He'd provide what comfort he could until they got back to the Resistance.

Once they were back, however, Zero was going to make sure this attack on the city was set to go the very next day.

* * *

><p>Shadow hadn't moved from his post beside Zero's lab table. Cerveau had the android hooked into monitoring equipment and even ran a cord to charge him, just in case, but the unit hadn't budged since he'd been placed on the lab table.<p>

It was the same one he'd been placed on after the incident with the Omega Protocol, Shadow realized.

He'd been watching and listening over his link with Blues, so he was up-to-date on the planning going on in Hirondelle's lab, and he was mentally going over a checklist of everything that'd need doing once they teleported into the city.

A change in the room's light levels brought the Robot Master from his reverie and he looked up as a ring of light coalesced in the air about five feet from him.

Shadow recognized it as the same sort of light that appeared whenever a Cyber Elf (namely X) entered the physical world from whatever plane they rested on.

Zero stepped from the ring of light after a moment, turning and glaring through the light at whatever was beyond it. "No, you're staying there, and if I hear one more damn argument, I'm going to stay there _with_ you just to make sure you listen." Huffing, he turned around, a bit surprised to find the room mostly empty.

It was also a bit disturbing to see his body lying on the lab table, and he shuddered a bit at the sight.

Shadow immediately recognized Zero, even if his form mirrored how Wily originally built him, taller height and all, and not the body lying prone on the lab table. He initiated a scan on the Cyber Elf, his one open eye greying out for a moment as he expectantly held out his metaphoric hand for a status report.

It was a relief to see that the unit was fine, aside from no longer being present in his physical shell. But, still, "Are you alright?"

"Better than X, at any rate," Zero said, granting Shadow's systems full scan access. "Where is everyone?"

That meant that X was at least alive, though Zero scolding through the portal had been an indicator. Shadow still forwarded the data to Blues so he could dispense it on the Lightbot network. "After you collapsed, they decided to reconvene in Hirondelle's office to plan the siege tomorrow. They're nearly done now."

"Collapsed?" Zero frowned; he hadn't thought about the effect his maneuver would have on his physical body. Standing still as his brother continued the scan, Zero's eyes turned to Cerveau, who was quietly typing away on his console near the back of the room. "Cerveau, those schematics I gave you a while back, were you able to construct any of the weapons I asked for?"

Cerveau looked up from where he'd been filing away some additional records on his console. "I did, actually, thank you for reminding me. I'll get them here for you once you're back in your body and can actually carry them." Seeing as getting them together for Zero to take now was pointless.

"Of course," Zero said with a nod. "Shadow, you almost done?"

Shadow took several more moments to complete the scan, then nodded. "I am." The elder Wilybot considered Zero for a moment. "Aren't you forgetting something?" Shadow's gaze wasn't at all subtle as it fell, very pointedly, on Zero's unconscious body.

"I'm not sure how long it'll take for the upload," Zero said. "I don't remember the effect the first time I jumped bodies, so I have no idea what normal boot time is. As it stands, I should probably report to Blues directly, let him know what's going on with X, so could you let him know I'm on my way down?" and he left the room, heading for the access ladder and testing out just how floating and flying worked in this form.

In Hirondelle's office, they'd nearly completed their plan for the siege. Elec had remained with the group since he was already there anyway, and Ice was listening and watching through a feed in much the same fashion as Shadow. And, of course, the unit was studying the considerable history that'd passed while they were deactivated.

Rock was holding a datapad, flicking through the information, when Zero entered the room. The child didn't miss him, though, and his clear blue eyes darted up, taking in the Cyber Elf. Rock himself never saw Zero as he was originally built, but he was more than recognizable to him by now. "Zero?"

Zero nodded towards Rock, though his gaze was focused on Blues. "He's safe," Zero said, not waiting for the unit's head to turn in his direction. "His body…his body was severely damaged, but I helped him break the tether, so he's not in pain anymore. However, without a physical shell to tether to, he can't manifest on this plane without risking full deletion." Only a moment out of Cyberspace in Sanctum Yggdrasil and he'd already lost his legs. "And someone stole Dark Elf."

Any relief Leviathan may have felt at hearing that X yet lived was swiftly killed by the news of Dark Elf. A cold, nauseating feeling dropped into her gut and she actually swayed on her feet for a moment. "Dark Elf…_how?_"

Blues' gaze was centered on Zero and he was frowning now at the news, though that Dark Elf had been stolen didn't hit him or the other Robot Masters quite so hard as the Reploids simply by merit of them not being active during the Elf Wars. Blues was silent for several moments, mulling over this new data. "I take it that they were gone by the time you arrived to look," otherwise Zero would have used a different descriptor for the perpetrator. Blues looked back to the maps. This could be a problem. It was, more than likely, the same person that was mucking up utilities in Neo Arcadia that pulled this off. "I wonder if she was removed from the city, or is being held within." More than likely removed, given the described potential for destruction this unit yielded. If she was there, however, this entire siege just became a lot trickier. "What sort of state would she be in immediately after release from holding?"

Sometimes, being held in stasis like that was exhausting, and if she was drained, then that bought them some precious time.

"I'd have to ask X for anything conclusive. I wasn't around for her sealing, so I'm not quite sure what she'd be capable of so soon after release," and Zero shrugged a bit.

"But Master X is okay?" Faucon asked.

"He'll be fine as long as he stays put in Cyberspace. He seems fine while there but when he attempts a physical world manifest, he starts fracturing almost immediately."

"And what of you?" Harpuia asked.

"I'll be fine," Zero replied. "I only came down here as am I because it would have been faster than reintegrating with my body and finding out I've got a boot delay because of it."

"You should go back in your body," Rock said, the worry still communicating clearly in his eyes. "Even if you're okay now, after…after what happened to X, I'd rather not chance something happening to you," and it was undoubtedly _safer _when mind and body were one.

"I'll be _fine_," Zero insisted. "My body is downstairs in Cerveau's lab, and Shadow, as far as I know, is still in there keeping an eye on it. Besides, I need to get caught up on the briefing. I'll upload once I'm up to speed on the plans, since I'm sure I missed a lot of details."

Rock didn't look convinced, not at all. Instead, the worry on his face deepened as he initiated a few surface-level scans on the Wilybot, frowning slightly at the limited results he was getting. "You sound like X, saying things like that." And X wasn't fine.

Zero really had to fight the urge to roll his eyes, sighing deeply as he allowed full one-time permissions for Rock's scans just to settle the little unit. "Your brother is fine as long as he remains in Cyberspace. Once we have the city back under our control, we can do something about building him a new body and setting him up that way. If I'm not mistaken, he did say that you were quite involved in his construction, so you'll be able to help. Don't worry," and Zero smiled softly. "I'm not going to let anything bad…anything further happen to X, or anything bad to happen to me."

Rock still didn't look wholly convinced, but he did push deeper with his scans, and he nodded softly once he got satisfactory results.

Elec was frowning just slightly, though not at Zero's insistence. He was more concerned about this 'Dark Elf', who Ice was doing a _lot_ of research on at the moment, and what she could do. "Taking someone like the Dark Elf is a major move on the chessboard. If whoever is running the city is assured enough to take this step, then they're planning something. We should take the opportunity to rout them before things get even more out of hand."

Phantom nodded, his lips pursed in a thin, tight line. "And the faster we move, the better. I don't know if we'll be able to manage any sort of mental protections, though, against Dark Elf's attacks. Even during the core years of the Elf Wars, there were more units lost to her taking them over than were lost to actual Mavericks."

"We'd be some of the only ones immune," Harpuia noted, "since we were programmed immune."

"Even so, this siege is still a surprise to them, and if we strike before she's been prepared," and Elec honestly hoped she needed some prep time and wasn't just waiting to be released like a lion in a gladiatorial game, "Then we may even be able to reclaim her before they have a chance to use her." He knew that that was absolute best-case scenario and that life was almost never that generous, but the alternative was waiting, which held no chance for them.

"That is true," Phantom noted. "Still, it would be wise for us to be going into that city with all our defenses and firewalls fully activated. Limit wireless permissions to only known units. Refuse any unrecognized incoming connection link requests." Phantom looked up to Blues. "We're going to need some form of identification coding for your wireless signals," since the Robot Masters had kept to themselves for the most part.

"Is there anything you'd like to add, something we might be missing or not accounting for?" Harpuia asked, looking between Blues and Elec.

"We'll exchange wireless identification," Blues nodded. "We can, however, simply not allow units we don't want onto the network, if it came to that." Locking them out was never a problem. So they would compile a list of units that would be in on the raid, and not allow access to units that weren't decided on before the strike.

Zero's face was set in an upset scowl, blue eyes boring a hole into the holographic map display in front of him. "How long will it take to plan out the routes for the team starting in Sub Arcadia?"

"An hour, maybe two, just to make sure the units can manage the routes I'm suggesting," Phantom said.

Zero nodded. "Leviathan, mind keeping me company while I upload and get me briefed on the mission?"

Leviathan smiled and bowed, "Of course, Zero." Leaving off the 'Master' appellation still felt a bit odd, but it wasn't disagreeable. She thought that it was odd because she was so used to living in a military setting now.

"I expect to see the Zeroth ready for training on the Level Six in two hours, and I'll have Leviathan send a message if I haven't booted by then," he said before turning and moving through the door, Leviathan close behind.

Phantom pulled a chair over to the map display, dropping down into it as he zoomed the maps in on the residential district and the tunnels beneath. Staring at the display, he was going over the routes he knew to the surface, eliminating the ones that would be hard for the Resistance to use and setting up a list of possibles he'd reference when he started building their routes.

Harpuia grabbed a chair and sat down next to his brother, resting one hand on the younger Reploid's shoulder.

Phantom's gaze didn't break from the maps, though one hand did move up to rest on Harpuia's, a silent thank you to his sibling for the support.


	42. Reclamation

_First off, we'd like to apologize for the wait. In an ideal world, we'd be able to get these out regularly, but we've had to do some revising/editing and real life does make that difficult when you're balancing work schedules and real-world obligations with a recreational hobby._

_And here, the siege begins. The Resistance has finally made its move, a bold assault on the chessboard as Neo Arcadia abruptly finds itself on the defensive. She is not without her protectors, however, as Fefnir makes his stand against the Resistance and the remnants of his family. Things don't go quite as planned for the Resistance, but when doesn't Blues have a contingency in place?_

* * *

><p>Leviathan's armored boots were very audible in the halls of the Resistance base, even if she wasn't tromping about the way Fefnir did. She'd finished her charge in the early hours of the morning and was headed to Cerveau's lab for Phantom and Harpuia, who'd charged there overnight. Everyone was tense all throughout the base, tense and quiet, and despite Zero's assurances that X was alive and relatively well, there was still that worry gnawing at her, that anxiety seeping into every corner of her mind.<p>

She knew it wouldn't quiet until she saw her father again.

She was happy, though, to see that Harpy and Phantom were already disconnecting from their pods when she arrived at Cerveau's lab. "Good morning, you two."

"Morning, Levi," Phantom said as he pushed himself from his pod, grabbing his helmet from the nearby table and pulling the armor on, the gears whirring softly as it clicked into place.

"Morning, sis," Harpuia greeted, taking his helmet from Phantom as the younger unit passed it to him. "I'm looking forward to getting this over and done with."

"The final prep is in Hirondelle's office, so we should head there." Leviathan nodded in agreement with Harpuia's sentiment, though: they wanted this siege to go quickly and smoothly. She only prayed that the Dark Elf wasn't a hidden ace up their foe's sleeve.

It was a quick trip for the siblings, Harpuia taking point as they moved through the halls, and they strode into Hirondelle's office, each carrying themselves as they had throughout their years of service to the city, as they had been taught to by X. "Is everyone ready?" Harpuia asked.

Hirondelle nodded. "We're uploading route maps to the security team leaders now," and Hirondelle looked to Faucon, Autruche, Aigle, Moineau, and Colbor. "Everyone loaded?"

Nods from all five units.

"We are fully prepared as well," Blues said from where he was standing near one of the consoles, head turned to inspect one of the displayed maps, flagged with several color-coded markers. They'd spent a good part of the night going over the map and discussing the most expedient routes to send varying troops to so that when the scramble began, teams of units running on unofficial direction wouldn't be bumping into each other on their edited patrol routes.

Hirondelle nodded again. "Neige confirmed security of the surface Trans Server, so I'll be outbound in about fifteen minutes. The other units will be hitting their entry points immediately after." He looked to Blues. "You and Shadow will be following forty-five minutes after the last unit is out?"

Blues nodded in affirmation. "Once Shadow and I teleport in, we'll be immediately assuming control of the network. The others can teleport directly following us."

"Leviathan should be first out," Phantom noted, "since she's rendezvousing with Elec's team."

"We'll be standing by at the Trans Server she'll be heading to, so we'll move out once she arrives," Elec said.

It was then that Harpuia noticed one person missing from the room. "Where's Zero?"

Faucon shrugged. "Master Zero hasn't checked in yet, and his signal's still offline."

Four floors beneath the security room, Zero was looking over the weapons that he'd gotten from Cerveau the previous night and worked on before setting himself to hibernate and restore whatever files the trip to Cyberspace had repaired.

He hadn't expected the restoration effort to be so comprehensive.

He pulled his helmet on, moving for the weapons laid out on his new maintenance table. Reaching out, he set the pistol into his holster, sheathing his saber only a moment later. Reaching around, he triggered the newly-installed weapon latches on his hip armor, hanging his war fans from two of them. A pair of small hilts were hung from the two front clips, and he then secured his naginata just above his pistol holster. Attaching the shield generator system to his left gauntlet, he double-checked that the tech worked, and then turned for his door.

He was running late.

"We should send someone down to check on him," Phantom said. "He knew what time we were starting. Do you think that something happened when he went to check in with Father last—"

"Atten-_hut_!" Zero called out, striding into the room, eyes quickly darting over the assembled units. "Colonel Hirondelle, I assume the security units are prepped for transfer?"

"They are," Hirondelle responded, an eyebrow raised at the rank Zero had addressed him with.

Zero stopped for a moment, half-glaring at the unit. "You will address me as 'sir' or 'Lieutenant Commander', Colonel. We are on a _vital_ mission today, and the last thing I want is anyone thinking they can get away with treating this like just another raid on the city." He looked at the other five units, still all sitting. "_On your feet, soldiers!_" he barked.

In one fluid motion, all five of the units were standing at attention.

"You have all of your required data and your defenses fully activated?"

"Sir, yes, sir," they chorused out.

"Then down to the Trans Server and prep your teams!"

"Yes, sir!" they answered, heading out of the room.

Once the half-dozen units were out of the room, Zero turned to Blues, snapped to attention himself, and saluted the Robot Master. "Commander Blues," he said.

Blues straightened when Zero turned to him, several alerts coming up in his mind's eye as his system tracked the android's every movement. None of them were deemed hostile, even if they could become hostile in the blink of an eye. Behind the sunglasses, Blues blinked at the title appended to his name. Rather than saluting Zero, he nodded to the unit, an acknowledgement and acceptance of the title.

Zero waited for a moment before dropping his salute, figuring that the Robot Master likely wouldn't respond in kind, with the military protocol Zero had been trained to follow, the behavior set he'd operated under for decades during the Maverick Wars. "Lieutenant Commander Zero reporting in, sir. Sorry I'm late. File restoration extended my hibernation cycle."

"File restoration?" Blues' tone was a bit sharp, like a razor's edge, though he didn't sound upset at all.

"Yes, sir," Zero said with a nod, body language relaxing a little, almost as if Blues had ordered him at ease. "I had a… file repair effort engage during my time in Cyberspace. It ran a bit longer than I expected," due in small part to Zero not bothering to check the estimated run time. "It's nothing that will interfere with my work on the field today, sir," and he looked to Harpuia and Phantom. "With your permission, sir, I'd like to start mobilization prep with Generals Harpuia and Phantom."

"Go ahead," Blues nodded, the Robot Master's head tilted as he scrutinized Zero from behind the lenses of his sunglasses. "Once the forty-five minute timer ends from the time the security team is dispatched, everyone will be sent out in quick succession, so ensure your troops are prepped and ready to go."

"Understood, Commander," Zero replied, "and…if I may, sir, are we receiving any additional support?" If the profile data Wily outfitted Zero with was any indicator, then Shadow had already told Blues of the comprehensive database Zero recalled when the Omega Protocol activated..

Blues actually hesitated at that. "I believe that the units we have lined up will be more than sufficient," he finally said, and there was a note of finality to his tone.

"Forgive my questioning then, sir," and Zero saluted again before signaling for Harpuia and Phantom to follow him, walking out of the room.

Ice and Elec's gazes followed Zero out of the room, and once enough time passed that the android would be well down the hall, the two Lightbots turned to look to each other. "His behavioral pattern has completely shifted," Ice said, his gaze moving from Elec to Shadow. "How much did he restore?"

Shadow closed his one open eye and responded, "If he didn't restore everything, then there isn't much left that he _doesn't_ remember."

"He'll be more reliable on the battlefield for it," Blues said, even if his systems were still on alert. The Protocol was gone now, irretrievable and unreadable. Right now, the only chance the Zero unit would ever have of activating it once again was finding an alternate copy of his programming code and restoring, but given the way he felt about the Protocol, that was _highly_ unlikely. Even so, that reasoning did little to quell the unease churning beneath Blues' calm façade. He checked his internal chronometer. "Let's head down, they should be departing soon."

And once the first wave left, everything else would fall together in short order.

* * *

><p>Ciel ran into the Trans Server room, Milan hot on her heels, and she came to a quick stop. "You already sent the security team ahead," she said. "Why wasn't Milan sent out with them?"<p>

"Ciel," Zero said, "you may be X's co-commander, but your place isn't on the battlefield. Milan is staying here as your bodyguard in the event that something happens," which, in all honestly, nothing would as long as the Robot Masters were controlling the city network. "Cerveau, Rocinolle, and Menart are being left behind as well. Some of the other technicians and half of the security monitors will be staying at base."

"But I'm the second leader of this group," she insisted. "I was part of your rescue effort. I've been training with the buster pistol. I _need_ to be there with the rest of my team, with the Resistance. This is as much my fight as it is anyone else's."

Blues looked over from where Elec was speaking to him and the other Robot Masters. He heard Ciel's 'argument' against being left behind quite well. "Need? No, you need to _not_ accompany us. You need to stay _here._ You've little to no battle experience, you wound easily, and you move slowly. By asking to accompany us, you are requesting _my_ units to guard you, to cover you in all events, and thus, distract them from their objectives. I will not allow that. You are staying here."

Ciel actually looked offended at that point. "That's not fair, damn it! Zero already ordered X to stay off the field because of his condition, and now you're demanding I do the same? Who's supposed to head the Resistance? Sure, we've got Zero and the security team, but I'm a _commander_. I'm supposed to be a leader for this organization!"

"Actually," Zero interrupted, "I held seniority over X during the Maverick Wars. I was a Unit Commander for several decades, headed the tactical espionage and reconnaissance squad. If there's anyone that _needs_ to be on that field today, it's _me_. I was _built_ for combat. You weren't. You're a _scientist_, Ciel. Even X relayed as much, said that your position within this organization was as high as it is because you lead the non-combatant half of our forces. Stay here, stay safe. We'll take back the city, remove Copy X from power, and we'll make sure that it's secure. Once we've taken the city back, _that's_ when we'll send units back here to pick everyone up."

"I'll be _fine_," Ciel insisted. "I don't understand why you're telling me to hide like I'm a child."

"You _are_ a child," Blues said, still frowning. "Even by human standards, your brain isn't even finished developing. And how long have you been holed up in this base, only seeing the same people every day? Your combat experience is nonexistent, you do not think things through before acting, and rather than accepting your place like an _adult_, you're arguing with us like an _adolescent._ You will stay here."

"What happened with Zero was an _accident_, Blues," Ciel fired back. "I had been shot at, seen my friends killed, and was trying to hurry and get out of there before things got any _more_ out of control. You can't hold that incident against me. And what if I have been here for four years? I've been doing something to at least save a few of the thousands marked falsely Maverick because the unit I was tasked with building got turned into that monster running the city in X's place. Now I have you telling me that all I've done, all the work I've done, everything I've given, has only earned me the right to cower like I'm _scared_ of the city? What gives you the right to tell me what to do anyway? Being X's brother doesn't mean you can boss me around."

"I am commanding the team that will give this resistance the ability to even _enter_ Neo Arcadia safely." Honestly, what did X have to do with it? "I already told you that by requesting to go, you're requesting _my_ units to act as a guard to you. You're asking Elec, Ice, and Rock to not only storm Neo Arcadia, reroute troops or take out those that don't follow direction, cut a path to Neo Arcadia Tower, gain access to it, and disable that copy, but you're asking them to _take you along as a passenger._ Don't pretend as though you can't see why I can't allow that."

"Ciel, we're not trying to say that you can't come with at all. We're saying we need you to stay safe for now and follow us once the city's secure. Once there's no risk to you, we'll send someone back." Zero shook his head. "We need you, just not out there. Not in the city as it is now."

"This isn't fair," Ciel repeated.

"Life isn't always fair," Zero returned. "Stop for a second, though. Think about this. Where are you stronger, better suited, Ciel? The battlefield is our place. Yours? It's helping the city get back on its feet. It's helping units adjust to being able to be themselves again. It's making everyone in that city feel safe and comfortable again, just like you've done for the Resistance members here."

Blues remained silent. The girl's insistence was riding right on the edge of what he had patience for right now, so if someone else was willing to deal with it, then all the better.

"I want to be out there," Ciel countered. "I get what you're saying, but _you're_ not listening to _me_."

"Yes, I am," Zero reassured. "And this isn't just me talking. The Hunters _never_ allowed humans on the field, not while there were combatant units out there. Yes, humans are immune to the virus, but the skills that they have, that you have, are better put to use where you are _safe_."

"I _did_ read the historical data, you know. Humans were the only ones allowed on field decon crews," Ciel fired back.

Zero couldn't help but to groan and roll his eyes at that. "Yes, they were," and he shook his head, "but they were out there with a whole unit keeping guard _well after_ the hostile forces had been dealt with, never during active maneuvers." His gaze shifted to the gathered Robot Masters for a moment before another counterpoint to her argument popped into his mind. "Also, I'm fairly certain I detailed a particular bit of the Robot Master's operational information to you. You can't tell me you don't understand being ordered off the field with that taken into consideration."

Ciel fell silent for a moment before nodding. "We shouldn't run afoul of any enemy forces, not if this goes off without a hitch. I still think that—"

"No," and Zero's voice left no room for argument. "If the biggest part of your argument is the idea of a plan going off 'without a hitch', you're already proving yourself far too optimistic about what we're about to do. You have to be realistic, and if you want to be any sort of leader to this organization, to the city once it's operating under X's guidance again, you need to take the strengths and weaknesses of all involved parties into consideration without letting your ego or your personal opinion get in the way." He smiled at her then, resting one hand on her shoulder. "You're not the first human to challenge this way of thinking, and I doubt you'll be the last, but there's something that I told the woman who created Mother Elf, who coded my daughter," and he paused here for a moment. "Before they finished this body, before they'd finished work on my daughter, I went to see how their work was progressing, to see if I could help, and she told me that the team felt terrible that Reploids got sent out to that battlefield, fighting and dying, while they remained in a bunker underneath the main Hunter facility. What I told her that day I'm going to tell you now, and don't think that a hundred years makes it any less true. By putting those who could fight and survive in the field out _onto_ that field and keeping those whose strengths were in other pursuits out of danger meant that we were stronger than _any_ opponent, no matter their strength or numbers."

Ciel nodded at that. So many times her father had told her that of her late great-grandmother's experiences, and only now was it truly sinking in what it had all meant. "I…I'm sorry," she said quietly.

"Stay here," Zero said. "Stay safe. You'll return to the city as a hero, as a beacon of hope, regardless of whether or not you fought. You provide your own unique light to chase away the darkness. We'll be back for you before the end of the day."

Elec nodded, a slight smile on his face, a sharp contrast from Blues' apparent poker face. "And besides, there's plenty of work to be done once we have control. We need to get at the power grid first thing." So really, Ciel did have a lot to do, a lot she was needed for. This obstacle just wasn't hers to tear down.

Ciel nodded again, turning and heading out of the room without a word.

"Milan," Zero called, and the Reploid stopped and turned to him. "Do me a favor and keep her confined to her quarters. I don't want her following us, and as much as I think she gets that she needs to stay here, I wouldn't put it past her to try and follow anyway."

"I'll do what I can, sir," Milan said before leaving the room to find Ciel.

"Commander Blues," Zero said, turning to the Robot Master then, "once your units teleport out, we'll be following. How long will you need to reprogram the emergency alerts and secure the city network?"

Blues considered it for a moment. "To take control of the network and secure it, less than two seconds. Add another two to reprogram the alerts. The patrols will take longer: they have emergency responses they are trained for, but in full, perhaps six or seven seconds."

"So my original estimate of ten seconds was a bit high," Zero noted. "Understood. The power grid will remain online for the Trans Servers we're coming through and you'll authorize us onto the net for communications once we land, so we'll all be wired in within the first minute of the attack." He turned to look at the newest addition to the Zeroth. "General Leviathan, I want you set for first transport."

The coordinates were set, everyone was ready, and now, it was just a matter of giving the sec team the time allotted to evacuate the citizens, to move them from the industrial and business districts, to clear the path for the teams that would, very shortly, be attacking the city. The Guardians were fidgeting from time to time, and Rock and Ice seemed to have made some kind of game to play on one of the datapads, but Elec, Shadow, and Blues were holding still, so still it was almost like their systems were in standby.

When it got down to the final fifteen seconds, Ice put the datapad down after wiping what they'd been doing from it, and Rock slid off his stool. The taller three units lifted their heads, each Robot Master watching the timer count down.

Ten seconds, five.

Three.

Two.

One.

The _millisecond _the countdown timer hit zero, the Robot Masters initiated their individual teleporters and in five colorful streams of light, they disappeared from the room.

Blues landed in the manufacturing district, though not near either warehouse he'd raided. He stepped over to a nearby wall, leaning nonchalantly against it as he accessed first their sensors, immediately pulling them into his sway and preventing them from alerting the patrols that his power source was once again beneath the Eden Dome. That took a millisecond and once that was set, he accessed their network. He took a few more milliseconds to seep over it, to access every single security clearance, to set himself once again as system admin. At the same time, he felt the others log in, also cloaking themselves. That was his cue.  
>In that instant, Blues exerted himself over the network, blocking all outgoing message capabilities for Neo Arcadians. He and the other Robot Masters could still communicate freely, but not one of them said a word. The Resistance could deal with placating the populace: they had another objective here. So instead, he reached out and took control of all utilities in the city, locked off all of the archives, blocked every Neo Arcadian from doing anything outside of simply existing on the network. All they could do was listen. Then, he cordoned off a portion of the network, a portion that he and the others focused their nexuses into. From here, the Resistance could freely communicate without being overheard by Neo Arcadian forces. For the second time in a month, Neo Arcadia was completely disabled, except this time, this regime wouldn't be given the chance to recover.<p>

No more of these games. He was done.

And now, so was this twisted autocracy.

When Leviathan arrived in the trans server, Rock was standing at the control panel, looking up as it activated and transported the Reploid. She blinked, her gaze darting around, affirming that yes, she'd arrived safely and yes, the plan was unfolding without a hitch. She stepped down from the server platform, blinking when Elec, Ice, and Rock each initiated a scan on her, double-checking to be sure she was alright. "So far, so good?"

Ice nodded, "There's no one here," just as planned, "But they'll notice that they can't talk any more, and they'll be snooping around to find out what happened."

"We should get going," Rock agreed, stepping back from the server after erasing its coordinates, making the origin point for the teleport untraceable.

Elec was already on the move by the time Rock took Leviathan's hand and led her out from the Trans Server bay.

The minute Leviathan had teleported out, Zero ordered the coordinates changed. "Phantom and Harpuia, you're next."

"Understood, sir," they chorused out, saluting.

Phantom was the first to step onto the platform, disappearing in a flash of light.

Harpuia stepped onto the Trans Server next. "We'll be waiting for you, sir," he said, then disappeared.

"The minute my teleport is cleared, I want this machine locked and powered down," he instructed. "One of the Robot Masters will come back with the all-clear." Pulling his saber from its sheath, Zero stepped onto the platform, closing his eyes as the transfer initialized.

* * *

><p>Copy X looked up from his terminal, wondering about the odd silence from Judge Schilt and why he'd stopped mid-sentence. '<em>Hellbat, is everything alright?<em>' he sent, frowning as nothing but continued silence reached him.

Fefnir fixed his emerald eyes on Copy X. "You coming?" He knew what was happening, even if the Reploid claiming to be his father wanted to try to pretend otherwise.

The unit was silent for a moment, trying to keep from blowing up at the unit once more. "Not with you, AXR-003, not when your idea of protecting this city includes such vehemence toward me. I'll follow behind once you're clear of the Tower."

The crimson Guardian returned the comment with a sneer. "Fine, coward, have it your way. I'll make sure to save some of my family for you, so you can order them killed from a safe distance." He turned to leave. "And call me Fefnir. It's the name my _father_ gave me." He addressed the two Zan'ei posted by the exit. "Keep his royal aloofness covered. No need for him to scratch his new paint job." He stepped onto the lift, not waiting for either of the stunned units to respond.

"Does he have a shadow?" Copy X asked the Zan'ei as they stepped into the room.

"He does, Master X. PZ-153 volunteered for the assignment."

"Good," and the unit got to his feet. "Select sixteen of your best, I want two Zan'ei posted to each of the Judges. If AXR-003 is right and this is the work of the Mavericks, I want the Council protected."

"Understood," and both units darted out of the room, using the ventilation ducts and the lift shaft to move into other areas of the Tower.

He did a quick check to ensure Logistics was done with the repairs to his Armored Phenomenon, and then set it to standby. As the lift slowly made its way to the levels with the barracks, he went over the most recent detail of which Lieutenants were out on patrol. By the time the lift doors slid open, he had his assignments figured out, though whether the orders he gave were going to be followed remained to be seen. He had his suspicions that his orders were going to be filtered through 'Master' X, though the communications blackout hadn't been accounted for in any case, so he at least had that going for him. Stepping out of the lift terminal, he casually punched the nearby alarm with the side of his fist, filling the barracks with a cacophony of blaring sirens which were quickly accompanied by rushing footsteps as units from various armies filled the hallway, each looking for some tidbit of information as to the source of the commotion.

As Fefnir strode through the crowd, the units quickly became aware of him and began to form ranks and follow behind, the units before him stepping smartly aside and falling in with the rest as they strode past. He opened a public wireless broadcast and hoped that only the units that were supposed to hear the announcement caught it. '_Just in case you haven't managed to notice, the communication network is down, which means either someone's practicing to take over for Phantom, or whatever forces were responsible for taking the progenitors have decided to pay us a visit. Seeing as there was no announcement that _I_ am aware of concerning anyone being promoted to General, I'm fairly certain it's the latter, so get ready! From here on out, unless you get a direct order from either myself or Master X, follow it at your own peril! Herculious, Kuwagust, get to the landing platform _pronto! _I want you both in the Residential District ASAP. Get the people _off_ the streets, and detain any obvious stragglers for questioning. Take whatever air support you need, but don't you dare kill anyone. If you're fired upon, I want the bastards _alive!' He still needed answers from whomever it was that wanted to take down the city this badly, answers to questions that only burned more after his trip to the desert. '_Get going!_'

Elsewhere, the two Mythos beetles looked at one another for a short moment, then silently nodded to each other and ran down the hall for the lifts, one squad of HR units on their heels while another branched off towards a nearby lift station to gather additional Pantheon support. '_Hyleg, Phoenix, you two get to the Manufacturing District, same orders. Take Warriors and Variables for support. Poler, cover the Commercial District with hoppers and FJs. Panter, you've got Sub Arcadia. Use the remaining Pantheons and take the PZ squads with you. Make _absolutely certain_ no one is down there that's not supposed to be, but keep in mind I want to question whoever you find, so leave them in one piece._'

The units scrambled to carry out Fefnir's orders, and he headed for a nearby lift station, not bothering to check if the adjacent Trans Server was running, knowing that even if it was, the Resistance most likely had it rigged to send him somewhere unpleasant. With a heavy sigh, he stepped onto the lift and signaled it to take him to the Tower's ground floor. As it made its descent, he took his brothers' weapons and held them both in his outstretched hand. Closing his fist around them, he reminded himself of his promise to keep what was left of his family's memory intact, and then holstered the blades at his sides once more.

It was time to keep that promise.

PZ-153 had to be exceedingly careful as she maneuvered onto the top of the lift, staying close to Fefnir now that it seemed the fight he'd sought out in the desert had found its way into the sanctuary of the city. She knew, as did PZ-194 and PZ-57, that this was the Resistance's strike, that something had happened back at base that required they move _now_. She only hoped, with the General's siblings mobilized against the city, that Fefnir wouldn't break more than he already had.

* * *

><p>Leviathan took point as they began to move through the streets. She noticed, as they jogged along, that there were a few mechaniloids in the alleyways and doorframes, peeking around corners, but even the ones that were equipped to hinder intruders just watched or ducked down.<p>

The security team really had done well, though. The streets should have been dotted with citizens, but as things were right now, this place was a ghost town. She knew, in the back of her mind, that those that didn't have time to evacuate would be holed up in buildings; a lot of them were built with fortified shelters on the basement level, back when attacks were more likely, back when people were far more paranoid than they are now. That the city's alarms had begun blazing within the first minute or so really only helped the evacuation effort: those that hadn't believed it'd be best to duck their heads would certainly be doing so now.

Rock kept looking skyward as they moved, never falling behind the others, but he was taken aback by the _size_ of the city, the height of the towering skyscrapers. The streets were orderly and clean. He didn't know if there was a disparity between social classes here, or if the whole city looked like this, but it really looked like care had been taken here for decades and decades.

Rock also understood that a well-kept terrarium was still a cage no matter how nice you made it look, and he could feel that Ice and Elec were in agreement that yes, while the state of the city was a good sign for the welfare of the citizens, it wasn't nearly enough to make a judgment as to whether they'd been _happy_ under that copy's rule.

Rock and Ice were limiting how quickly they could move. Leviathan wasn't exactly an Amazon, but her legs were still much longer than Rock and Ice's, her strides larger and her overall movement fairly quick, especially considering she was a marine unit. Elec wasn't running nearly as quickly as he could be, but right now, they couldn't afford to split up. They had to stay together, had to move as a unit, and get to the tower.

Rock almost asked where the tower was once they got outside, but a look skyward caused him to snap his mouth shut, the blossoming question dying on his lips.

The city's beauty aside, the tower was the tallest, most magnificent thing in sight.

And now, it was directly ahead of them, thanks to the street that Leviathan just led them to. He calculated their velocity with the projected distance and came up with a time. A time that he had to quickly recalculate when he realized that the tower was _much_ further than he originally figured: its size was a lot more massive than he first estimated. He sent a mental _thanks_ over the link to Elec for the calculation adjustment.

A half-hour of uninterrupted running would deliver them to the tower.

It was too bad, Rock thought, that it wasn't likely that they'd arrive unhindered.

* * *

><p>Zero was moving in tandem with Harpuia and Phantom. "You did say Fefnir's weakness was to electric attacks, right?" He certainly hoped he'd gotten the information right, since he wasn't carrying backup chips for his weapons.<p>

Harpuia nodded, coasting along next to his brother. "It's one of the reasons we were restricted to non-augmented sparring when we trained. Phantom's the only one who never chose an elemental alignment, but for the three of us that did, it provided unfair advantages in what were meant as training exercises."

"Is that part of the reasoning behind keeping Leviathan away from this fight?"

Phantom nodded. "It did figure in, though the larger portion of our reasoning is that she's a marine unit, so her Phenomenon wouldn't be of use here."

"Speaking of the Phenomenon," Harpuia noted, "I'm having issues setting mine to standby."

"They've been locked," Phantom said. "I've been working on the decryption for the past few minutes."

"And you still haven't cracked it?" Harpuia looked shocked.

"Almost got it," Phantom said.

"Hurry it up," Zero said, banking hard to the left as he continued trailing behind the units. "We're closing in on the tower."

"You really think that Fefnir's going to fight that close to home?" Harpuia asked.

"If I have him figured right, he'll be intercepting soon. We're still twenty minutes out."

* * *

><p>Fefnir had moved out from the tower and out into the city proper, blind and deaf but for his own sensors and systems. Trying once more to link into the city's net, he growled when he couldn't even get the main logon peripheral to load. Sprinting through the streets, he was a bit confused to see so many of the mechaniloids hunkering down in alleyways and behind buildings, as if knowing that a storm was brewing and that they didn't want to be caught in it.<p>

Rounding a corner, Fefnir caught sight of a few of the FJ units that he'd assigned to Poler Kamrous leading some of the straggling citizens to emergency shelters. They returned his gaze, snapped a quick salute, and quickly resumed their escort mission. Fefnir nodded to himself, grateful that no fighting had broken out anywhere…just yet. Even considering his disdain towards the humans' general cowardly demeanor, he refused to allow even a single civilian casualty in the upcoming battle.

* * *

><p>He was still in a rush this time around, but Blues actually had the time to look around and take the scenery in as he walked briskly through the manufacturing district. It wasn't a residential or business district, not somewhere that most of the citizenry was <em>meant<em> to be, and so, they really didn't go out of their way to decorate. It was orderly, certainly, but it was almost corporate in its design. Very bare, very basic.

Not that there was anything necessarily _wrong_ with that, it made sense, really, when it came to allotment of resources. It just didn't give Blues much to look at. He'd begun walking after about three minutes, after taking the time to be absolutely certain he had a good grip on the city, that nothing would come spilling from between his metaphoric fingers.

Elec's group was making good time and the security team managed to get the city fairly well evacuated. Blues was willing to bet that that final Guardian would home in on the Zero unit's group, especially since they'd be noisier than Elec's, so he'd be suitably distracted while they slipped into Neo Arcadia Tower and disabled them from within.

The tower itself was obnoxiously grandiose. There was a second edifice beside it, nearly as tall, but it was very obvious, even from this distance, that the greatest amount of care, the greatest amount of time, effort, and resources had been delegated to those two structures. Such a tall and looming building was a very obvious target, Blues thought. It was better to camouflage places of import, to hide them amongst everything else, if only to make them that much harder to locate.

Then again, he reasoned, they probably weren't working in the mindset that they _could_ be targeted at the time.

* * *

><p>"Wouldn't it be easier to get Fef's attention if we…well…attracted attention?" Harpuia asked.<p>

Phantom frowned. "You just _had_ to ask that of the ninja in the family, didn't you?"

"Well, sorry that you're the only one in the family that makes a habit of _not_ being noticed," Harpuia fired back.

"Generals!" Zero snapped. "Processors on the mission, not this little brotherly spat!"

"Yes, sir! Sorry, sir!" both responded.

"If you have an idea to get his attention, I'm all ears," Phantom admitted after a minute.

"Stop here then," Harpuia said. "Lieutenant Commander, if you and Phantom could find somewhere under cover?"

Zero cocked his head to the side, but followed Phantom into a shadowed recess between two of the buildings they were near.

With a quick nod to himself, Harpuia fully engaged his thrusters, taking to the air as he triggered the weapons chips in his sabers to activate, tossing one of the active blades down toward the street below. Focusing, he readied the second blade, sending a wave of electricity down to the saber that pierced the street.

The crack of thunder, even with such a small strike, would be enough for Fefnir to know where they were.

"Come for us, brother," Harpuia said to himself, sending another arc of lightning down to the grounded sword, feeling the soft vibration of the thunder's roar run through him.

* * *

><p>Hyleg was moving through the streets of the manufacturing district, close to a squad of Pantheon Variables, and stopped short, seeing a single form moving down the street. "You there!" he said, turning to face the unit in the distance, "stop by order of the city of Neo Arcadia! All residents are to be off the streets by now!"<p>

Responding to Hyleg's wireless command, the squad of Variables moved ahead of him to intercept the individual they'd stumbled across.

Blues was moving quickly, though his body language was confident, the same way a manager is confident when doing rounds in his own plant. Confident because he belonged there, because he had every right to be there. There were little ones here, but they stayed ducked into the alleyways between the warehouses, or stayed out of sight inside. He could tell they wanted to link, that they wanted direction and reassurance, and he had to force himself to keep walking, to not stop and tend to them the way he'd been programmed to. His gaze was focused on Hyleg and his Pantheon units the second they rounded the corner. There hadn't been enough time to duck and cover, not without being seen.

Well, he knew going in that an encounter was very likely, even if it'd happened earlier than he'd have liked. Blues strode forward, frowning slightly as he dug through the military files, reaching through thousands of personnel data folders before he found a match for this unit. This one was one of the higher-ups. He wouldn't be able to bluff his way out of this. And he couldn't command line these Pantheons to go and sit down, either.

* * *

><p>"We're more than two-thirds of the way there," Leviathan reported, chancing a glance over her shoulder even though she knew her three uncles were keeping pace with her. "There will be Zan'ei units posted at the door, and at least one Lieutenant patrolling the campus of the facility. Copy X will be near the top of the building, though he's a few floors shy of the roof. He'll have two Zan'ei guards and at least two Lieutenants with him. He'd have had Fefnir, too, but I'm certain that Phantom and Harpuia have already drawn him out."<p>

"I'll lock their lifts," Elec said, quickly doing so to limit how quickly reinforcements could move through the building. Now the Robot Masters were the only units authorized to operate them.

"So that's a projected minimum of three Lieutenants, plus elite guard units and whatever troops are in the tower," Ice summarized, though he suspected that the troops in the tower would be all that weren't in the city already.

"They'll be confused," Rock reminded them. "If we can explain what happened, maybe they'll stand down."

"I'm not sure that'll work, given the situation, Rock," Elec sighed, though he didn't outright veto the notion.

X had been watching for some time as the Resistance moved through the city, and though Zero had ordered him to remain in Cyberspace, he wasn't about to sit this battle out, regardless of his condition. Pulling back from his current vantage point, X moved through the digital world, already setting a new exit as he moved, coming out of the portal just ahead of Leviathan and her team.

He winced a bit as he cleared the ring of light, struggling to keep his legs close to solid. It took a great deal of control and energy to do so, though, so he knew he couldn't follow them for too long.

Rock actually _stopped_ when he saw X, almost causing Ice to run into him, and his eyes became round with shock, worry, and, strange as it was on his face, indignation. "X? X! What are you doing here! We told you to stay in Cyberspace!" Rock finally remembered that he had an ambulatory system and it was indeed online, and he strode forward, initiating every scan he knew on the Cyber Elf in the meanwhile. "Retreat immediately! You're not stable!"

"I'll go back once I have a status report!" X snapped back. "And don't tell me that I don't have a right to that! This is my city, Rock! I'm not going to stand aside while everyone else does the work when I was supposed to _lead_ this attack!" There was a cold anger in X's voice, aimed not at Rock, but at the situation that he'd found himself in. "Elec, status report, please," and there was an urgency in his voice as he kicked his defense program online.

"Everything is proceeding as planned. Blues and Shadow have the network, and if the lightning is any indication," and Elec tilted his head toward another part of the city, where Zero's group was approaching from another direction, "Then Guardian Fefnir already found Zero's team." Elec was also scanning X extensively, and his frown was even deeper than Rock's. "And Rock's right, you should _not_ be here. You were supposed to lead this attack, but circumstances have changed, and you're leaking energy like nothing else. Return to Cyberspace until you've stabilized."

X turned, concentration momentarily broken as his right leg's data fractured, and looked toward the arc of lightning that had just been fired. Turning back, there was a moment where X's eyes met with Leviathan's worried blues before he nodded. "Thank you," he said, dissipating into Cyberspace.

"Father!" Leviathan cried out, her voice caught between exasperation and worry, but it was too late: X was already gone. She glared at where he'd been just moments before, then sighed at length. She saw the look in his eyes and she just knew that he was going to disregard Elec and Rock's advice, that he was just going to go over to where Master Zero and her brothers were to check up on them and probably every other group from there rather than resting, which was what he needed to be doing the most right now.

Rock dropped his gaze to the ground, worry and just a little bit of anger still gnawing through him, a cold, uneasy feeling he never enjoyed.

"Come on," Ice said, stepping forward. He paused though, blinked, and realized that they'd all forgotten something. "Rock." When the little unit met his gaze, Ice offered Rock his hand. Comprehension dawned on Elec's face as Rock grasped Ice's hand, Rock's eyes greying out for a moment as he copied the other unit's abilities.

"Take mine, too," Elec said, holding a hand out for the child to do the same.

"I can copy the abilities of other Robot Masters to use," Rock explained when he noticed how blankly Leviathan was looking at him. "I can't believe we forgot to do this beforehand." He sounded a bit sheepish there: it was sloppy preparation.

In the back of his mind, Rock realized that Blues also failed to copy any abilities.

* * *

><p>Hyleg stepped back, falling into a ready position. "Unidentified unit, stop where you are! We will escort you to a safe facility until the city has been secured!" Four of the Variables switched out for their buster cannons, holding them steady though they didn't charge them. The other six activated the stun rods, though they held just as still as the rest of the squad.<p>

Blues continued walking, not breaking his pace until he was about thirty feet from the Pantheon squad. He looked them over, not terribly impressed—they reminded him of the Joe robots, which only soured his mood. His gaze went from the Pantheon units to Hyleg. "Stand aside."

Hyleg blinked, shocked by this unit's audacity, but without a connection to the city's network, there was no way to pull up anything more from a scan other than…

"_You!_" the lieutenant said suddenly, and the four Pantheons nearest him suddenly turned and darted back the way they'd come. "What brings you back to our fair city, progenitor?" he asked.

"You're sending them back to gather what, reinforcements?" Blues sounded fairly amused by the concept. "That's not very hospitable of you. When I was first here, I noted a number of improvements to be made to your, ah, 'fair city'. I think you'll find them to be quite agreeable when all of this is done with."

Hyleg glared at Blues, refusing to answer him about the Pantheons. "Our city, despite its problems, is not in need of your assistance in such a way. What is of importance to us is the nature of your core and if its power can be replicated. With something like what you carry, our city will never need to rely on faulty systems again." He nodded. "Now, please, progenitor, come with us."

"Children shouldn't be allowed to play with knives," Blues said, raising his left arm and falling into a battle stance. His buster formed around his hand, now pointed at the Pantheons that were still training their sights on him. "And I can't afford you any more consideration. Stand aside or I will clear you out of my way."

The Pantheons were asking for orders across their link with Hyleg, the serpentine Reploid caught between his orders from Fefnir that they were not to open fire and the fact that the progenitor they'd lost was now standing right in front of him. "I'm afraid I can't let you leave," he said, sharp claws protruding from his hands. "You have something that Master X believes belongs to this city."

Something changed in the progenitor's stance at Hyleg's words, and anger passed over his face, if only for a moment. He didn't say another word. Instead, he darted forward and in an instant, he was amid the Pantheon units. He could tell that they were still asking for orders, that their commander hadn't issued any yet, and he certainly wasn't going to give Hyleg any more time. He kicked the one nearest him in the chest, the Pantheon not at all expecting Blues' heft and strength, and it went flying into the two behind it. He turned then, arcing a roundhouse kick to the two that were approaching to defend from the side. His ankle and knee were locked and he made certain to hit them in structurally weak points, the same way he did when he was disciplining the other Robot Masters.

When their legs detached from their pelvises, he hadn't expected so much coolant to come out. It splashed over his pants, but he hardly paid it any mind. The sixth Pantheon tried to grab him from behind, but he reversed the hold and flung it over his shoulder, into the recovering units that were in the front, then fired his Buster into them. They were done. He turned to Hyleg then.

Hyleg's blue eyes widened in shock and horror. Even in the worst skirmishes he'd been in alongside the Guardians, he'd never seen _anyone_ dispatch units that ruthlessly or efficiently.

But the first shot had been fired, and unlike the Pantheons, Hyleg had a modified Zan'ei ambulatory system. Unlike the patrol models, Hyleg could_ move_. "Wrong choice, progenitor," he said, darting forward.

Blues opened fire with rapid, pulsed shots. They weren't as strong as a standard shot, but they still _hurt_ and at this distance, it was like getting sprayed by a shotgun. Blues was a bit surprised and even mildly impressed that Hyleg managed to dodge them and that he managed to get into close quarters without taking a hit, but he was more than confident in his ability with hand-to-hand combat, even if he didn't have any blades to pull.

Hyleg's left arm snapped out, aiming for the unit's throat, but Blues dodged back, the strike instead catching the side of his head and ripping the unit's sunglasses off.

The sunglasses clattered to the ground, and Blues' gaze followed them for an instant before snapping back to focus on Hyleg. The unit's claws had torn into Blues' synthetic skin, leaving raking gashes along his temple and the side of his face, above his cheekbone, but no coolant or other fluid leaked out. His sensors still picked it up and posted to his processors about it, his systems more alert because it was on the outside of his headcase than because his skin had been cut. He almost snarled, his mouth twisting into a grimace, and he kicked Hyleg in the chest, _hard,_ forcing the two units apart.

Flying back from the force of the impact, one hand pressed against his chest, Hyleg redirected his auto-repairs to counter the ruptured fluid lines the hit had caused. For his age, the progenitor certainly hit a _lot_ harder than expected, and that said nothing of the weight class the unit was in if only one leg had done that much damage. Glaring at the unit, Hyleg was a bit disturbed to see that the skin on the unit's face wasn't healing, nor was there any coolant draining from the wound, but he ignored the oddity of the unit's construction in favor of making sure the progenitor didn't leave this city again.

Elsewhere in the district, Phoenix had just gotten a connection request from a Pantheon unit, turning to face the Variable as it ran up to him. "What happened?"

'_Lieutenant Ourobockle has located the progenitor unit, sir,_' the Pantheon relayed. '_Requesting immediate backup,_' and he provided location coordinates.

With a nod, Phoenix instructed two of his Warrior squads and three of his Variable squads to form up. "The rest of you know your orders!" and he took off towards the provided coordinates.

He just hoped Hyleg's request for backup wasn't warranted. With the unit's skills, a request for additional units was a bad sign.

* * *

><p>Fefnir saw a dim flash of purple off to his side in the middle distance, followed by a faint crackle of thunder that was much sooner than he'd thought it would be; they were much closer than he thought they should have been. He opened his local wireless again, trying to get a lock on Poler Kamrous. She wasn't in range, and now that he thought about it, it probably wasn't a good idea to broadcast orders so close to his siblings anyway. He flagged down a passing patrol of Pantheons led by a Golem and told them to pass a message along to the Lieutenant as soon as possible, then watched them speed away, the Golem lumbering somewhat slowly after them.<p>

He knew what was coming. Heck, he may as well have called it here, and with it the rain of fire and thunder that would ensue as their battle played out. In the end, he knew that even with the advantage of having the only active Armored Phenomenon, there was a very real danger that this was a suicide mission. That being the case, he was determined not to drag anyone else down with him. He only hoped that Poler didn't try to meet with him to argue his orders.

This was his fight, and it was time to make history.

Harpuia waited a moment before firing another bolt into the street below, letting the charge fire into the stone and steel beneath, feeling the echo of that last thunderclap against him, before he dropped back down to the street, pulling the grounded saber up and falling into a ready stance, his eyes and sensors scanning for any movement. There had been Pantheons that had passed, but he and Phantom had had little trouble dismissing the units, simply overriding Fefnir's commands with their own.

It seemed they still had a bit of sway in the city after all.

"Phenomenons?" he asked, looking to his right as Zero stepped out from the side street, the android activating the shield tech on his gauntlet, faint lines of electricity crackling along the edges.

"Just finished breaking the encryptions, you're good to go," the ninja replied, drawing his repaired Cross Star as he leapt onto the roof of the building he'd been ducking behind, his eyes narrowing as he looked down the empty street. "He's inbound."

"Line of sight?"

"Not yet," Phantom replied, "but there was a local wireless access attempt a moment ago. I don't think he noticed me, but he's close."

Zero drew his naginata then, thumb hovering over the activation switch, the handle of the weapon still compacted, and the ex-Hunter looked to Harpuia for a moment. "Keep your strikes from critical points, I'd rather not lose your brother trying to get him to settle down. Anything charged hits as a glancing blow, just enough to jolt his systems, and keep your blades away from his ports and his processor." No sense risking the same kind of surge with one of X's kids that had left Zero all but a newbuilt. "Phenomenons are linked and on standby until Fefnir engages his, no sense in goading him when we don't have that much room to move around in and way too much collateral around us."

"Let's hope it doesn't come to that, Lieutenant Commander," and Harpuia straightened as Fefnir rounded the corner a few blocks down from their current position.

At the slight movement in the shadows near their brother, Phantom frowned. Did he have a Zan'ei shadow and not even realize it?

As Fefnir caught sight of the two Reploids in the street, he began to charge one of his busters. When he recognized the one next to his former brother, he said to no one in particular, "I don't know where you are, but whoever is tailing me might want to drop back to a safe distance. Things are about to get ugly." At the assembled pair, he said, "So, what's the Resistance paying you to turn family against itself, oh _legendary warrior_?"

"Some way to greet your father's old friend, General," Zero replied. "We are not here to—"

Fefnir's uncharged buster fired a quick burst in Zero's direction, causing the other Reploid to lean casually out of the way. "Shut it. I don't care about what you're here to do. Your presence here can only mean that you finally have enough of my siblings to make a move on the city, which is all I need to understand. I don't have anyone else to turn to, so it falls to me to clean up my own mess and lay my family's legacy to rest, including the blatant Maverick currently masquerading as my father locked safely away in his precious tower, most likely hoping we'll take each other out as we fight. So don't bother trying to convince me that we're on the same side or that I'm just confused." He began charging his other buster. "The fact is, I already know you're not my family anymore. You're not here to save the day, you're not here to fix anything, and you're not what you might try to say you are." When his second buster charged halfway, he vaulted forward, punching the ground violently and flinging himself into the air. "Because if you were," he locked eyes with Phantom standing on the roof of one of the nearby buildings, then pointed his fully-charged buster at him. "You would have _taken me with you_!" and he fired off the fully-charged shot then, rocketing through the air much like he had through the base just a few days ago.

To say that he'd been surprised by Fefnir's comments regarding the Copy would have been an understatement, that shock compounded by this apparent new attack his brother had developed in the last few months. That, however, didn't slow Phantom down, and the ninja jumped clear of Fefnir's attack, activating the Cross Star and landing deftly on the weapon a few feet behind his brother. "Part of me shouldn't be surprised that you've discovered that copy isn't Father," Phantom said, his katana drawn but inactive. "What does surprise me, though, is the fact that you still think us Maverick when a move against the city would indicate we are trying to remove that unit from power."

"As for taking you with," Harpuia said, taking to the air for a moment to reach his brothers, "how far into the city, into the Tower, would we have had to move to collect you? How long have you spent by Copy X's side, supporting him despite your conviction that he is Maverick? Don't think Levi didn't tell us about—"

Fefnir fired a rapid burst at each of his brothers, forcing them to dodge away from one another. "You leave her _out_ of this! Don't you _dare_ use her to cover up your bullshit! You had the _perfect _opportunity to take me along if you are who you're claiming to be." He continued firing at Phantom, drawing the unit further away from their airborne sibling, and began charging his other buster. "Instead, you were so busy making your battle plans you didn't even notice I fell for your stupid bait. Now you come here, attacking _my city_, claiming to be its saviors? I don't think so!" and the charged buster let loose with a huge gout of flame in Harpuia's direction.

The Rekku unit banked hard and got as far away from the flames as he could manage. Even if fire was Levi's weakness and not his, it still _hurt_ getting hit by any of Fefnir's charge attacks.

"Stupid bait?" Phantom asked. "Forgive me for underestimating my units, but I hadn't actually thought Magnion would give anyone those coordinates. When Copy X didn't bother to ask for them when I was at the hearing that cleared my Order of Retirement, I thought it simply a lucky break from an inept unit."

Coming around as the last of the conflagration petered out—and thankful that the attack hadn't set any of the nearby buildings on fire—Harpuia landed a bit closer to Fefnir. "That aside, plans were changed yesterday. While you've been here, blowing a chuck of Anubis' patrol area to glass, _something_ attacked Father's body. Something _destroyed_ his body, broke the seal he nearly died to create, and stole Dark Elf." As Fefnir wheeled around at that bit of information, the winged unit's eyes went wide. "You recoded your eyes."

Zero, by this point, had moved for the walkway between two of the buildings, dash-jumping onto the roof. He was careful not to get too close—he'd seen the initial assault against Phantom and was _not_ interested in getting in front of another of the unit's fully-charged flame-dash attacks. That Phantom was so agile probably saved the unit from a very extended stay with Cerveau. "We are not here to fight you, despite what it may appear as to you. We are here to reclaim this city for your father, your _true_ father, rebuild his body, and reclaim my daughter from whoever it is that is trying to destroy Neo Arcadia. You call yourself this city's protector, claim it is _your_ city, but they have not broken their oaths," motioning to Harpuia and Phantom. "They are still to this city exactly what you are, Guardian."

Fefnir began charging both of his busters, but adopted a strangely easygoing stance. "Okay, sure, let's all stand around and tell each other fairy tales about duplicates and stolen weapons." He quickly dropped into a much more aggressive stance than he had originally taken throughout the fight so far. "No, okay? Just no. I mean, I know I was never the brightest of the bunch, but do you honestly believe that I'm stupid enough to believe that there's some _copy_ of our father running around, pretending to be him? Or that this copy could be so evil as to let the fact that this world's most dangerous Cyber Elf has been stolen simply go unannounced?" He fired yet another enormous fireball in Zero's direction. "I don't think so!" and the unit rocketed forward, his second buster trailing a line of fire behind him.

"Lieutenant Commander!" Harpuia cried, knowing that neither he nor Phantom would be able to intercept in time.

The alarm in Harpuia's voice was more than signal enough that the fireball had just been a diversion, Zero's left arm coming up as his shield engaged, the android taking on a defensive stance just as Fefnir plowed through the fireball, his buster impacting against the energy shield with a sharp crack. A small jolt of electricity danced along the edges of the shield before arcing into Fefnir's buster, and Zero sighed as he raised the still-inactive naginata and bopped Fefnir lightly between the horns of his helmet. "Your brothers were right when they said you had a temper that'd make me look tame by comparison."

He could only stare incredulously at the situation he'd managed to put himself in. Somehow, his attempt at an attack had landed him squarely in front of an android who, if his father's stories were true, was a master of close-range combat. On top of this, he was surrounded by the very siblings he had meant to scatter, and neither of his busters had any charge whatsoever. He'd had his misgivings about this fight already, but he never imagined he'd be defeated so…handily. It was more than his already fragile psyche could handle. "Stop toying with me, you ridiculous bastard!" He made to punch Zero in the gut with his other buster, even though he knew it would be far too slow.

Zero's motions were practiced, fluid, and graceful, far more refined than anything the AXRs had ever learned. Deftly moving back and to the side, one arm snapped out and grabbed the Reploid's wrist behind the armament, tucking himself inside Fefnir's wild swing before he used the unit's slight momentum to flip him and send him hurtling to the street below. "I'd like to see you explain how _spelling out the truth_ constitutes my toying with you, Fefnir," Zero challenged, jumping down to the street himself, Harpuia and Phantom hanging close by, their gazes locked on their brother. "The copy of your father tearing this city apart is not so much evil as he is young," he explained.

"He's only four years old," Harpuia clarified. "Placed in command when Father lost his body to Dark Elf's sealing." The eldest of X's children was silent for a moment before he reminded the Jin'en General of something he had said after the issuance of Phantom's Order of Retirement, seemingly a lifetime ago now. "Says something about Father if it takes a full diagnostic nearly a year to run."

But Fefnir was done listening to what he thought was too coincidental to be true. "_No!_ Don't you _dare_ try to use my own wild theories against me! You were the ones that tried to convince me that the nutcase sitting on _our father's_ throne was the real deal, remember?! Now you come back after having who knows what done to you and you want to tell me I was right all along? How could you possibly think that would work?!" Fefnir's expression changed to one of angered alarm as realization dawned upon him. "You're stalling! Levi's not here because you have her heading for the tower! Now I _know_ you're not who you say you are; you're going to get her _killed_ trying to have her go up against that madman! I have to stop her! And that means…" Fefnir's body began to glow white as he activated his Armored Phenomenon. "…Going through you!" He fired all four cannons at points around where Zero was standing, hoping to land a lucky hit by not giving him room or time to dodge the large blasts.

The strikes never landed, Harpuia having rocketed toward Zero the moment Fefnir initialized the Phenomenon transfer. "We'll draw his fire, Lieutenant Commander. The Phenomenon may be a tank, but he's still slow. Quick strikes from offside will be hard for him to avoid," and Harpuia's body began to glow as he, too, warped on his Phenomenon, electric tendrils lashing out from the wide wings that carried him skyward.

"I'm afraid we can't let you do that, Fefnir," Phantom said, already having completed the shift as Harpuia moved to flank their brother, "And don't worry, Levi's not going against that unit alone. _Our uncles_ are with her." There were eight large blades rotating around his body, the glowing red sensors on each blade flashing as they verified their targeting lock on Fefnir. With a flick of his wrist, the first of the blades moved for the ground just in front of the unit.

It would be the only warning Phantom would give him.

* * *

><p>By the time Hyleg recovered from Blues' kick, the Robot Master had his buster aimed and charged, firing off a much heftier shot. He had to hold his stance steady as he exhaled a bit heavily, noting that his systems were only escalating, that there was a dull ache in his chest once again, a direct result of becoming engaged in battle without his armor equipped, without his support systems connected. He grit his teeth and darted forward again, choosing to ignore the pain in favor of ending this skirmish quickly.<p>

Hyleg dodged again, though the blast did connect quite solidly against his left shoulder, buffered only by the reinforced armor covering the joint, and he hissed at the pain. Moving for Blues again, he kept low, raising his arm only at the last second, aiming to hit the unit's buster and disable his main weapon.

There was a soft whirring noise as Blues disarmed his Buster, ducking down at the same time as he lunged forward, getting inside of Hyleg's strike. He punched his fist into Hyleg's shoulder, then through it, gripping the portion of the joint that was the arm and ripping outward, tearing the unit's arm clean off his shoulder as coolant flowed out from the considerable injury.

Hyleg cried out at the attack, negating all the alerts his system was returning as he offlined the pain sensors. Coolant flowed from the wound freely, though the auto-repairs were doing what they could to stem the tide, nanites little by little repairing the gaping hole where his arm had once been. He kept moving, though, staying carefully clear of the progenitor, both sickened and offended that the unit was using his own dismembered limb to try and hit him.

Reploids were _messy_. Blues shifted the dismembered limb to his right hand when Hyleg backed off, his buster reforming over his left. If the unit wanted to fight at range, that was fine: he was more than capable in that regard.

It would only become a problem if this was drawn out too much longer, but at the rate this unit was losing fluids…

It'd have been better to take a leg, Blues thought, even as he aimed his buster once more, firing at the unit's chest once again.

Hyleg rolled clear of the blast, remaining hand still covering the damaged shoulder joint. He winced once more, system alerts going into the red, and managed to avoid another shot, this one merely grazing his left leg. He did stagger a bit, but he was at least close enough to a nearby building that his uneven gait resulted in him hitting a wall.

There was a rush of relief as Phoenix's connection request came through, and he accepted the link. '_I'm down an arm and six Variables,_' he told the lieutenant.

Phoenix had been airborne for the last few minutes, scanning the ground below, and the unmistakable trail of red near the coordinates only verified the reason for the tremor in Hyleg's voice. '_An arm?_' he asked. '_What kind of unit dismembers an opponent?_'

'_The progenitor, apparently,_' and Hyleg backed away from Blues, dodging yet another shot as the Pantheon squads cleared the corner and rushed to overtake the single unit.

Phoenix landed, coming up behind Hyleg and holding the unit steady as he looked over the wound, grimacing as Pantheon units started falling to the progenitor. "Get back to the Tower. Send a report up to Master X and the Zan'ei guards, and get the other four assassins up to his room. You need to report to Medical. Go."

With a nod, Hyleg ducked away from the battle, running as best he could to the safety of the tower in the distance.

When the additional Pantheon units rushed in, Blues took a step back and a steadying breath, inwardly pleading with his core to not worsen, not now. He was still gripping Hyleg's arm in one hand, his buster at the ready as he turned, counting the units and deciding on how best to take them out.

And then one of the Pantheons stepped forward and there was a cracking sound.

His sunglasses. The unit just _smashed_ them.

And now he was smashing the Pantheons. They were too much like the Joe robots, too mindless, a waste of space and time. Unable to think for themselves, unable to protect themselves. Just fodder. Fodder that was quickly becoming acquainted with his Buster and with the fact that he had multiple charge levels. He didn't even flinch when he overestimated a shot and it smashed through a cluster of seven or eight Pantheons and into one of the warehouses behind them.

He'd verified from the mechaniloids in the district that there were no humans hiding here. He didn't have to worry about casualties.

Taking to the air once more, Phoenix's battle protocols were already fully online, and his duplication ability kicked in a second after he'd launched a half-dozen flaming projectiles at the progenitor. The eyes of all five Magnions narrowed at the progenitor, watching in anger and dismay as the Pantheon units were mercilessly mowed down.

From five different directions, five different angles, he and his illusions charged the progenitor unit.

This had to end _now_.

One of the Pantheons actually managed to get a swing in on Blues, aiming for his chest but hitting him more on the shoulder. It was only by merit of numbers that it even connected, but Blues retaliated immediately by turning around and swinging, punching clean through the optical visor on the Pantheon's helmet, the unit immediately crumpling. He was taking out another before it even hit the ground.

He was fortunate to have multiple processors, or he may not have made proper note of what Magnion was doing overhead. He noted the technique, the illusions that Magnion was making, and it was not unlike the trick that Gemini Man employed.

Unfortunately for Phoenix, Blues was more than acquainted with Gemini's abilities. It took him less than a second to discern the real Magnion, the real attack, and he rolled down, grabbing one of the heavily armored Warrior Pantheon units and pulling it down with him, using its body as a shield as he returned with fire of his own, even as the attack impacted him. The Pantheon took some of the bite out of it, but Blues coughed, his physical display programming overriding his commands to stay offline as his core keened, lancing out at once, overrunning his body with spikes of volatile energy, incredible pain lancing through his systems and piercing his processors.

Phoenix was able to avoid most of the return fire from the progenitor, though one shot did connect quite cleanly through one of his wings, and he tumbled a bit as he offlined the other wing's sister thruster. He leveled out just in time to see the unit collapse forward, dropping the Warrior he'd used as a shield. Turning to one of the remaining Variables, he nodded. "Get him offline."

The Pantheon strode forward to the kneeling unit, raising one arm as the buster switched over to the stun rod, and brought the weapon down hard on the back of Blues' neck.

Blues shuddered for a moment, then slumped forward and laid still.

* * *

><p>There was something like a hiccup over the network, and Rock's song on the Harmony suddenly became <em>very <em>uneven, even as Elec jumped to grab the network where Blues had dropped it, he and Ice scanning outward alongside Rock, looking desperately for their suddenly lost brother.

There was no reply, no signal, _nothing_.

Rock turned to face the direction he'd last felt Blues, but then a loud rumbling sounded from above, from the sky, and all four members of Elec's team looked skyward just as rain began pouring down, a torrential downpour as five new signals thrummed on the network.

Ice and Elec looked to each other, smiles slowly creeping over their faces, grim but hopeful. The rain hadn't been planned, but it was a nice touch, a definite asset. It boosted both their abilities, and with these typhoon-like conditions, it'd only slow the enemy.


	43. Reinforcements

_So, we apologize for a late update. Real life happened, as it tends to. Midnyght has a five-year-old, which easily explains why she may have a harder time getting writing done. Haruna Rei received a job offer, only to have it revoked due to someone in management changing the job requirements after the fact and is severely disheartened. She'll survive. _

_So we have a bit of a shift in the story here, and it's marked by a change that we feel is necessary to warn you lovely readers about. There will be swearing due to the introduction of one character in particular. While we don't feel it's excessive, it is a departure from what we've previously established, and a warning is only fair._

* * *

><p>High above the city, up near the top of the dome, a unit stood on a hovering platform, looking downward as rain exploded down from the clouds, as his lesser units teleported in dozens at a time. Hundreds of robots entered with him, following his direction to a T, covering the sky and acting in his name as he directed the climate control system. He felt the others arrive, teleporting into positions that'd only just been decided based on the situation at hand. He looked ahead, the platform flying away from the tower at the center of the city, instead heading outward to where the buildings were shorter, scanning outward, using the network to query the various mechaniloids there, just as he knew the others were doing for those in the vicinity.<p>

They just needed to know where, he told the little ones. _Just tell us where, and we'll do the rest._

From somewhere above where Leviathan and the others were standing, on one of the buildings that lined this avenue up to the city tower, a voice shouted, "It's been a long time, Mega Man," followed by the familiar whine of a charging buster, "but I haven't slowed down a bit!" And a charged shot sailed down towards Rock.

Old enemy profile databases screamed to the forefront of Rock's consciousness as his systems immediately identified that familiar voice. The profile slid into his peripheral, his systems tracking threats associated with this particular unit, and Rock was almost on autopilot as he gracefully hopped back from the blast's impact point in three bounds, pushing his physical capabilities to the limit without his armor there to protect him or enhance his speed and strength. The rain was coming down so heavily that it was hard to see and all four of the units in Elec's team were soaked through. Rock had to rely on other systems, had to back off his optics to even get a lock on his target. His buster formed over his right arm and Rock barely heard the sleeve rip along its seam as he raised his weapon, charging and releasing a shot of his own without a second thought.

Behind him, Elec and Ice scattered, Elec grabbing Levi and using his enhanced speed to take her from the blast's trajectory. He swore softly under his breath and in the Harmony, Ice was doing far more than that.

A dot of black and gold dropped along the building in the distance, arm already glowing as a new shot was charged up, Rock's shot impacting the building above him and sending debris and wreckage down with the rain. The minute the form hit the ground, he was dashing forward, arm raised and glowing. "Getting right to the fun part, huh?" he cried, firing off another shot towards Rock.

Rock didn't balk or falter. His face looked grim, like he wanted to argue about this but knew that right now, there just wasn't _time._ He was agitated to begin with, his queries to Blues were still coming up empty, not even busy or occupied, but empty like he wasn't even here and they should be _looking for him_, not wasting their time here.

That he wasn't in armor put him at a severe disadvantage against this unit, but unlike his opponent, Rock also had three teammates with him who would back him up. So the little unit ran forward to 'greet' this newcomer, buster aimed and charging, the tip becoming white hot with the energy focusing within, steam rolling off it as raindrops collided with it and immediately evaporated.

Once Elec had her settled on the ground, Leviathan spent (wasted) a few precious moments looking between her three uncles and this newcomer. But when he charged Rock, buster at the ready, clearly intending to battle for keeps, she darted forward, startling Elec. Ranseur in one hand, she knew that she'd be hard to see in the rain, focused as this unit was on Rock.

She timed it so that she would stay in the unit's peripheral vision and not in his direct line of sight, so when she swept her ranseur in his track, under his feet, he had no idea what hit him.

With an undignified sound of surprise, the unit hit the ground, rolling over a few times before he pushed himself to his feet, buster still armed. Snapping his head around, having difficulty seeing because of the rain—_Genius fucking idea, Air_—he finally locked his sights on Rock.

The light from Rock's buster did a lot in helping Forte see his opponent, though once Rock was close enough, Forte's expression went from gleeful rampage to confused. "Where the _fuck_ is your armor? The hell you think you are, Break?"

Rock blinked at Forte like he had no idea what he was talking about, then he looked down at himself. "Um, I don't know what happened to it. Blues said it was 'lost'." He looked up to Forte then, both units having their buster locked on the other, though Rock did look pathetic soaked through like that.

Leviathan blinked at the sudden shift in their exchange, but she still strode forward, the ranseur's blade cocked up and toward Forte. "Who the hell do you think _you_ are?" She'd gathered that this unit was a Robot Master, but to attack Rock here and now, when they had better things to do? Was he an enemy unit? A sneak attack like that was underhanded, but there was no way this unit was meant to be stealth. He was too loud.

"And who the hell are you to be asking me who—" but Forte found himself cut off mid-response.

Forte had run off ahead, _of course,_ instead of working on updating the mechaniloids with their new order set and link up to the others properly like he was _supposed_ to. The unit had a penchant for discarding whatever responsibility he was given in favor of personal pursuits, but Quick was used to having to chase Forte down and bring him in line. Which is why he didn't bother warning the younger unit before body-slamming into him at 150 miles an hour, sending the warbot careening into the nearest building. Quick stopped there, though, rather than continuing the attack, and straightened. He didn't even look at Rock or the startled Leviathan. His gaze remained focused on Forte, or rather, the hole in the wall he'd crashed through.

An undercharged buster shot fired from the hole in the wall towards Quick, Forte walking through the ruined wall a moment later. "Damn it all, Quick, you interrupting cow! How many times do I have to tell you to back the hell off and let me handle things my own damn way?"

"You were not given permission to engage the Lightbots in battle," Quick replied readily, hefting his massive Quick Boomerang to deflect the weak shot. "Why didn't you work with us to reassign the robot units?"

"Fuck permission," Forte said. "I had my own plans for this little maneuver of ours, so back the hell off and stop trying to boss me around. Besides, there's only one robot unit I give a damn about," and it was about then that Forte realized that his canine companion wasn't following him. "Where's Gospel?"

"You left him behind. A robot's Master should be looking after them, not asking others where their subordinate is." Quick was frowning now in slight disapproval.

"Bullshit, Quick. Which one of you held him back?"

A deep bark sounded from a nearby causeway, a mass of purple darting over to Forte, stopping near the unit's feet. Instead of sitting, however, the wolf curled around the back of Forte's legs, growling low at Rock and Leviathan.

Quick shook his head and shrugged, as though he had _no idea_ what Forte was referring to. He finally turned his attention to the four units they'd intercepted. "Where's the Eldest?"

Elec stepped forward then, motioning to Leviathan to relax, if only for the moment. "He offlined about seventeen point five eight three seconds before you all hit the city." Elec's gaze was more than a little scrutinizing: he recognized one of Blues' contingencies when he saw them.

Quick straightened some, the First and Second Number locked into something of a staring match. "Who was his escort?"

"I'm afraid this is my fault," a new voice said, and Shadow shimmered into sight from behind Rock. "He reassigned me to watch the 001 unit," the ninja motioned to Rock, "I did not sense it when he cut much of our link." Cut it so that Shadow wouldn't feel when Blues became engaged in combat, so the Wilybot wouldn't be drawn away from Rock.

Quick's gaze could have withered stone.

Forte snorted a bit at that. "Still have Blues watching your ass, huh, Rock?" His eyes turned back to Leviathan. "So, who the hell are _you_ anyway?"

Leviathan had rested the base of her ranseur on the now-slick ground, a part of her enjoying the rain, though it didn't hinder any of _her_ senses. She was standing more-or-less at attention, but she straightened fully when Forte turned his gaze back to her. "_I_ am Guardian Fairy Leviathan, General to Neo Arcadia's naval fleet, the Meikai Army." Her cerulean gaze was hard and sharp.

Forte considered her for a minute, shrugging. "If you say so. Certainly don't see a reason for you to be acting so high and mighty, though, if we got called in to cover your ass."

"I'd appreciate it if you showed my daughter more consideration," a voice said from behind Forte. "The General of my city's naval forces deserves the same respect you'd give to anyone above you in your family's hierarchy."

"X!" Rock turned to face the Cyber Elf once again, his systems on a high alert now that one sibling was unaccounted for and the other one seemed to be playing chicken with a metaphoric train. "Please, you need to stay in Cyberspace and rest." Rock's voice was pleading there and just a touch tremulous, his gaze focused on X's legs and how dim they were, in how they were flickering.

"Who the hell are _you?!_" Forte asked, wheeling around on the unit and wondering just what the hell he was…and why he looked like a taller version of Rock.

"I can afford a few minutes," X said. As it was, he'd only been following Zero's group through the city cameras, trying to hold whatever energy he could as he kept track of the units. He wanted to be there when they stormed the Tower, wanted to be there because of who he was. "I'm a bit surprised that there are more units here than…" and X stopped, panic flaring through him, his legs breaking into clusters of unformed data. "Where's Blues?!"

Quick turned and cuffed Forte across the helmet. "Were you listening at _all_ during the mission briefing? …Of course not." He shook his head at Forte, then turned his attention to X. When they'd accessed the network here in the city, the android had sent a link request, which Quick accepted after a moment's hesitation. He did limit what X could do over the link by a great deal, though. "The Eldest went offline seven minutes and…forty-three seconds ago. We've redirected all the robot units in the city to look for him and report back with their findings." Quick paused then and turned his gaze back to Shadow. "Shadow. Find him and bring him to us." Quick was certain that wherever Blues was, he couldn't move, and the longer he laid unconscious, the more likely it was that enemy forces might find him, if they hadn't already.

Shadow was visibly distraught, but he bowed, stepped back, and disappeared from view.

X's brow furrowed, and there was a quiet rage building in his eyes. If Fefnir was out in the city, it was likely that patrols were moving through other areas of Neo Arcadia, and that meant that it was entirely possible for someone to stumble across his brother, wherever he was. "Where was Blues stationed for the start of the attack?" His frown deepened as he felt both arms starting to go, opting to let them go closer to transparent rather than start fracturing. "There's a good chance Fefnir has Neo Arcadian military units on the streets, so the sooner we figure out where he was when he offlined, the better a chance we have that he won't be recovered by the city." Because if he was?

The results could prove devastating, and the Protocol's words rang in X's ears of the true volatility of his brother's core.

Rock was the one to answer, though his voice was quiet. He looked up to X, though his blue eyes were partially obscured by his dripping wet bangs. "He was in the manufacturing district."

"There was a massive battle there," Ice supplied, his head tilted as he queried the mechaniloids in the area, "They're reporting a lot of fallen units, but none of them are Blues. He's not there. I've ordered them to canvas the area, but all they're finding is a lot of…they're calling them 'Pantheons'."

X sighed. "The Pantheons are the main patrol units of the city," and his fists clenched, even as the data began to fragment. "I have to get back to Cyberspace. Someone tell Shadow to reroute to Neo Arcadia Tower," and he rested a hand against Leviathan's shoulder, looking to her for a moment before turning to Rock. "I'll give myself time to recharge, but I'm going after Fefnir. I don't need my family divided now."

X disappeared back into Cyberspace then, though like last time, Rock didn't look convinced. "He thinks they already have Blues."

"Air is en route to the tower, as is Shadow," Quick reported. "Let's go."

Forte fell in line quickly, Gospel at his heels. "Fuckin' Lightbots," he muttered under his breath.

* * *

><p>"Deathtanz, what's going on?" Childre asked as he got to his feet, meeting the Judge at his door.<p>

"Lieutenant Magnion recovered a unit in the city. Likely affiliated with the Resistance, since that's the current guess as to who launched the attack, but…"

Inarabitta turned wide eyes up to Mantisk as they moved for the lift. "What is it?" he asked.

"Magnion recovered the missing progenitor," the Judge said, stepping onto the waiting lift. "From what I've gathered, this unit singlehandedly retired over five dozen Pantheons and severely disabled Lieutenant Ourobockle. Magnion and the remainder of one of the response squads are headed back now."

"If the Council is being called," and there was a hint of sadness in Childre's voice, "they expect us to retire the unit and claim his core for the city."

"He will be seen as a dissident, and a dangerous one," Mantisk said, nodding his head. "As much as I hate this unnecessarily loss of life, this unit is proving a true threat to the city, and I fear we will not have enough units on our side to prevent that fate from befalling him."

The shorter Judge reached over, resting a hand against the Reploid's arm.

As the lift came to a stop, Foxtar and Flizard stepping off of another lift, Inarabitta kept carefully distant from the Fire Dragon Judge. "I don't like this," he admitted quietly.

As they stepped into the Council chamber, taking note of the unit laying prone on the floor, Mantisk sighed heavily as he moved for his seat. "Neither do I."

The unit was lying on his side, his hands bound in a heavy set of cuffs behind his back. His eyes were closed and he was still as death: an offline unit did not breathe. There was series of deep gashes coming from his temple to cheekbone, still there from Ourobockle's claws. It wasn't healing at all.

Most notable was that he was _covered_ in blood red coolant, and none of it was his own.

Phoenix stood quietly over the prone form of the progenitor unit, systems keeping a constant eye on the core that was powering him, worried for the pulses that it was putting off. He held himself steady, at attention, as the chamber door swung open, three Zan'ei units remaining at the doorway as Copy X walked into the room.

Moving for the central chair in the room, Copy X barely noticed two of the remaining assassins take point on either end of the Judge's table, the final unit a silent shadow, holding at attention behind Copy X's chair.

His eyes had not left the unit on the floor from the moment he'd stepped in the room.

Foxtar's gaze was on Phoenix, almost completely ignoring the lump of robot at the lieutenant's feet. "I have some difficulty believing the information relayed by the Pantheon that retrieved me," he said. "How can a _single unit_ decimate nearly seven Pantheon squads and send one of our own lieutenants to the medical wing?"

"As hard as it is to believe, Judge Foxtar, it is the truth. This unit, whoever and whatever he is, managed to wipe out six of Lieutenant Ourobockle's Pantheons in a matter of seconds. By the time I reported to the scene, Hyleg had already had one arm…had one arm forcibly removed from his person. This unit was using it…as a whip."

Inarabitta actually looked sick at that.

* * *

><p>Shadow was panicked, was sick to his stomach, but he had to try to force himself to stay calm as he checked the prison cells level by level, commandeered each mechaniloid to relay to him <em>everything<em> they'd seen since Blues went offline. He was here. This was where they put their prisoners.

Cell to cell, block to block, floor to floor, it was unsettling how _massive _this prison was, how many units it could contain. The others on the network were tense, each unit searching, searching, searching.

This was taking such a _long time_. A sickeningly long time.

They thought they had the place Blues was taken from, but there was no sign of him, and he'd made damn well sure that the robots nearby were ducked and in hiding for the duration of the altercation. They'd seen nothing. From there, Air's units were scouring outward, checking every hidey-hole they could think of, every dark corner and abandoned warehouse, looking for somewhere, _anywhere,_ that Proto Man may have limped off to shut down and stabilize.

They were coming up empty. And as sick as Shadow felt, it was nothing compared to Rock's emotional state, and he wasn't even empathetically linked to the unit. The Lightbots' network must just be _unbearable_.

This was taking too long. That thought kept replaying in the back of Shadow's mind, even as he found this floor's terminal database and hacked right in, going through logs, looking to see if there were any transfers of prisoners…

* * *

><p>"If the numbers are true," Flizard said, scowling down at the unit, "retire him. All he's good for to us, to this city, is as the source of a new energy system for the city, even in light of Telesphoros' work. Best to have a backup, and his core will provide."<p>

Hellbat nodded. "It's obvious that he's not willing to work with the city if this was his reaction."

"There is cause for concern at judging this unit so rashly," Foxtar noted, looking over his datapad. "The report from Lieutenant Ourobockle states that the unit offered 'improvements' for the city. Is there reason to believe that he only acted as he did because weapons were drawn on him?"

"Even if they were," Phoenix countered, "General Fefnir ordered us not to fire unless fired upon first."

"And the chance that the unit was provoked into attacking?" Inarabitta asked. "There was a request for backup sent in a very visible, very obvious manner. To do so would make even the most rational among us respond to an increased threat assessment."

"No unit that can take down so many should be allowed to live," Flizard snapped. "To leave him alive in the city would be no better than welcoming back the fallen Guardians with open arms!"

Kelverian glared at Flizard. "Still your tongue!" he ordered, worried eyes flicking to Copy X. "There is no reason for such vehemence. Both Foxtar and Inarabitta bring up valid points." He turned to Pheonix. "Lieutenant Magnion, how was it that the unit was detained?"

"From what initial scans can return," since his own systems were not calibrated to the level of the medical and engineering staff, "there's something wrong with his core power system. A flux of sorts, perhaps, that has rendered him offline. I am not sure if he will wake again."

* * *

><p>Harpuia's left thruster sputtered again, the unit teetering in the air as he worked to stabilize himself with his wings damaged as they were, the wind and rain of this unexpected storm doing nothing to help him. His right wing was bent and blackened from one of Fefnir's earliest attacks, and the left had fared little better even with the rain weakening Fefnir's shots. While his own attacks had been enhanced by the storm, had proved rather devastating against his younger brother even if none of the strikes had made direct contact, the unit was by no means down for the count.<p>

"We do not need further bloodshed," Phantom called out, floating a ways back from the fight, three of his blades twisted and warped, embedded in the street that had turned into their battleground, the targeting lights flickering, their propulsion systems far too damaged for them to be made of use any longer. "We may have attacked Neo Arcadia, but our efforts are not meant to bring death, only a restoration of order."

Fefnir was still unconvinced. "Again you try to placate me with faulty, backwards logic! You came here to save the city? Then why would you even call me out?!" He leveled his gaze at his younger brother. "You're a _master tracker,_ for crying out loud! Are you really telling me you couldn't have had me chasing shadows while you made your move?!" He turned to his other sibling now, disbelief written in his expression. "You two at least should _know_ my general mindset by now. Knowing my temper, you still thought it would be a good idea to confront me with some wild coincidence? Now here we are fighting because the one person that might have given me second thoughts is nowhere to be found, supposedly for her own safety, while you send her with some…what did you say before? Uncles?! Seriously?! You sent her up against someone who casually ordered the retirement of one of _his own children_!" He began charging his remaining three cannons, the fourth having been damaged in a way that made it far too dangerous to fire, even by his standards. "If you wanted me to believe you, how could you possibly think I would take your word without any sort of proof?! Especially after what you did to her!" He resumed his attack, concentrating on disabling Harpuia before he could take advantage of his elemental weakness much more.

Harpuia managed to get clear of the attack, dodging out of the way as one of Phantom's remaining blades shot through the air, shearing off half of one of Fefnir's remaining buster cannons before it jammed itself into the ground behind the General. "We called you out because we felt it necessary, not only for Leviathan's safety when we realized you'd activated your Phenomenon out in the desert, but for your own safety from the unit masquerading as our father."

"We used a tactic we knew would work to draw you away from the Tower," Phantom said, the blade he'd thrown shuddering before it pulled free of the ground and returned to him.

"And despite what they know of your mindset," Zero said from the balcony he'd jumped to in the wake of Fefnir's previous attack, his voice carrying over the noise of the storm, "we thought it wise to explain the situation once we'd drawn you clear of the Tower. We didn't think you'd already figured out that the copy isn't X; no one else has caught on in four years. As for proof, what else am I? I _know_ you know who I am, and if the way your siblings act is any indication, you know that I would not come here without good reason and a honest cause to support."

"What I know," Fefnir began to charge his remaining two cannons, aiming each one at a different sibling, "is that you have been missing for a hundred years. One _hundred years,_ Zero. Even if I was a trusting person, even considering your abilities, even knowing I don't stand a chance against the odds I'm faced with _right now,_ do you really think I'd just lay down and listen; that I'd believe you would just sit around for so long and simply _let_ the last hundred years happen?! Or more to the point, the last _four_?! Now you come here to conveniently clean up a mess that was created by what you already know is a fake and be the hero?! For all I know, _you_ bypassed the virus protections on my family yourself; just to twist them to your own ends! After all, you may have helped make a cure for what Sigma could do to others, but that doesn't mean you can't pull some stunt like that yourself!" He suddenly pivoted the remaining two cannons at either side of Zero's position, firing gigantic concussive blasts on either side slightly behind him while revving forward, intent on ramming the red Android while giving him as little chance to dodge as he could manage, disabled as he was. "Now tell me what you've done with my father!"

A quick hand signal from Zero stopped Harpuia and Phantom in their tracks, the blond waiting, taking only a single step back as Fefnir charged him, firing his boosters off at the last moment and jumping onto the front end of the Phenomenon. Drawing one of his tonfa as the inertial force of the lumbering armor nearly knocked him off his feet, the wet surface providing even less purchase, Zero gave himself a moment to stabilize before he stepped right up to Fefnir, flipping up and over the unit, the handle of the weapon catching between the raised horns of the AXR's helmet, and Zero pressed his feet against Fefnir's back and the rear of the Phenomenon. "One hundred years I have spent in stasis, locked away in a hole beneath your father's city, left to die because the scientists X and I trusted blamed _me_ for my original body being warped into Omega. One hundred years I was supposed to spend undergoing your father's ethical testing cycle," and he pulled back against Fefnir's helm a little harder, pulling the unit's head and maneuvering himself so that his black eyes met with the unit's greens. "I promised your father that I would stand at his side when I awoke, help rule this great city he spoke of throughout the Elf Wars, and when his body was destroyed yesterday, I was the one who tailed him into Cyberspace and ordered him to stand down in this fight, to remain where he was safe, because he does not need to sacrifice _his_ life when I am here to stand now as warrior and protector, Fifth Guardian to the Beacon City of Neo Arcadia."

Drawing his second tonfa, Zero's eyes were laced with anger, the blade activated, light green energy crackling with an electrical charge, and the blond hesitated for only a moment, letting the charge hit critical levels, before stabbing the Recoil Rod's blade into the back of the Phenomenon, mere inches from Fefnir's side, the charge firing through the wiring of the armor and into Fefnir's tactile sensory net. The unit shifted, pulling both weapons clear of his target, and he dropped fluidly to the ground behind Fefnir, taking his time as he walked around the now-disabled tank. "The Virus was once mine, but I am your father's friend, not his enemy. None who are taking command of the city and her network are your enemies." He was silent for a moment before he turned and looked to the others. "Both of you, disengage your Phenomenons!"

"Yes, sir, Lieutenant Commander!" Harpuia and Phantom chorused out, quickly recalling their armor and landing a ways ahead of Fefnir and Zero.

"There's one thing you need to know about me, Fef," Zero said, turning once more to the lumbering tank the unit was still attached to, damaged and inoperable though it was. "I never cared about justice, and I don't recall ever calling myself a hero. I have always only fought for the people I believe in."

Fefnir deactivated his Armored Phenomenon as well, the intense damage done to it causing him to immediately drop to his knees from exhaustion. "Fine, I get it. I failed. Just do what you came here for already and be done with it."

Zero clipped both his tonfas back onto his hip armor before reaching out and offering Fefnir a hand. "Not without all four of my fellow Guardians at my side."

Fefnir looked at Zero with a pained expression. "You really are here to put things right, aren't you? Then I've been wasting your time for nothing, and putting Levi at risk too. Just leave me here, I'll be fine. I can't keep up with you guys in this condition anyway." He waved away Zero's hand as he struggled to his feet, and then took a few shaky steps toward his siblings before falling to his knees once again. "Before you go, I just want to know why."

"Because they needed you away from that copy of me to ensure that you were kept safe, especially if word got back to the Tower that three of the Guardians were taking part in this attack," a voice said from behind Fefnir, a soft tingle registering against his shoulders.

"X—" Zero started.

"Not now," X countered.

"He's right," Phantom insisted. "You should be resting, Father."

Harpuia had moved to Fefnir's side by then, leaning down and offering his hand.

Fefnir took his brother's hand and rose to his feet once more, suddenly aware of a pleasantly warm sensation coming from the hands on his shoulders. "Dad, is that you doing that? How did—" He stopped cold when he saw what had become of his true father during the past four years. "Did that little monster up there do this to you?! When I get my hands on him—"

"It wasn't him," Harpuia said, one hand gripping Fefnir's arm tightly. "I should have explained it better when I told you earlier. Father lost his body four years ago when he sealed Dark Elf."

"And he's having issues with manifesting on our plane now that his body's been destroyed," and Phantom's tone hid none of his worry about X. "You shouldn't be here, Father. You're already taxing yourself by leaving Cyberspace. This is only going to make things worse."

"I'll be fine," and X pressed a hand against Fefnir's back, his halo locked on red as he pulsed energy directly into his son's core, the hand on Fefnir's shoulder soothing his damaged tactile sensors. "I should have been here, with everyone else, from the outset of this fight. I should have been here for Fefnir _and_ Blues."

Fefnir put a restraining hand up to stop X from continuing to use what life force he had left to heal him, stepping back a bit to emphasize his point. "Thank you for the help, but really, there's no point killing yourself just to get me back on my feet. That would be just too ironic." He turned so he could face Zero as well. "By the way, I know you guys wanted him to sit this out, but," Fefnir pointed to his father, "_This_ is proof of what you guys were saying. It would have taken him maybe thirty seconds to tell me what's up? I already knew the nutcase upstairs is a fake." He looked once again at his father, wondering what he must have been through in the past four years. He had a plethora of questions for him, but they would have to wait. "I guess you do have a point about getting me away from the Red King up there, though. All that aside, who's Blues? Is that one of those uncles you mentioned earlier? Isn't he with Levi? They haven't run into…what do I call him? Y? Copy X? I can't just keep spouting insults about him in the hopes that you all know who I'm talking about."

Zero moved to Fefnir's side, wrapping a supporting arm around the unit's shoulders. "Copy X," Zero clarified with a nod. "As I said, we fight only to return X to his rightful place in this city. And yes, Blues is your father's eldest brother," a soft smile at that, "and your uncle. One of four, actually, currently taking part in this assault, though he wasn't part of the team Levi's on."

Harpuia shuddered a bit, though only part of it was because of the rain drenching him. "What…what happened to Uncle Blues?" he asked warily.

"He's been offlined," X said, reaching out across the link to his brothers and to Shadow, asking for an update. "We've gotten backup, though, other Robot Masters," and he smiled at Zero. "Five more of yours," he said.

"Five…" and Zero's smile widened at that.

"Five more? Just how many relatives do you have, exactly?" He fired a quizzical expression at Zero. "You sure you've been knocked out all this time?"

It didn't take much for Zero to figure out what Fefnir was asking, and he shook his head. "I'm not at liberty to discuss how many I think I have left, and no, Fef, they're not my kids. I'm the youngest of my family's line, not counting Mother Elf."

"I thought Shadow-sensei was your only sibling," Phantom suddenly asked. "Since when were there more?"

Zero fought to hold back a snort at that. "Since Commander Blues decided he wanted to call for backup and avoid telling me directly." The Robot Master's careful wording of his answer to Zero suddenly made a lot more sense with this recent turn of events taken into account.

There was a slight delay in getting a response to X, since, over the network, the Robot Masters were essentially playing rock-paper-scissors as to who would relay data to X. Each was engrossed in the search, and after sixteen ties in a row, Air finally waved the game off and said fine, he'd do it. Elec, Ice, and Rock were in an area that could have enemy units, Shadow was picking through poorly-designed archives, but he was high up and secure, in a place that was unlikely he'd be seen and attacked, and even if someone did get up here? He had a full fleet of his subordinate units with him.

So Air sent a request for a communications link to X, skating through the sky all the while. He was loosely circling the tower, querying any robots he felt within, but taking care not to get so close the ones in the windows may be able to pick him out. '_We've begun canvassing the Tower. Shadow is scanning the prison levels and their logs. I've moved upward and have posted every mechaniloid in there with the order to relay any data regarding the Eldest back. They've been provided his visual data and basic systems signals,_'for recognition, _'__And will let us know if they witness anything of import._'

Outside of his link to X, Air sighed. He knew that that update sounded much like the last the android received.

Fefnir rubbed awkwardly at the back of his helmet, pointedly avoiding his father's gaze. "Hey listen, Dad, I'm glad you're in one piece…except you're not. Are you okay? You look pretty drained, and putting my sorry self back together definitely didn't help."

X frowned slightly as he fought to maintain his fully-manifested form, his legs already fractured and displaying as tendrils of data rather than limbs. "I'd rather I be the only one headed for the tower in bad shape," and it was evident by the red glow of his halo and the lack of focus in one eye that he was scanning Fefnir. "I thought I taught you better than that? How are you down two full tanks? The Phenomena don't drain _that _much."

Fefnir shot X an exasperated look. "It's been a _very_ long three days. I haven't had much of a chance to sleep what with being the only Guardian left in the city, not to mention blowing up Phantom's fake base, being put on trial for blowing up Phantom's fake base, realizing the 'father' upstairs is fake, calling him out on it, not daring to sleep in the same city as someone who may or may not be crazy enough to try to retire me in my sleep, and oh yeah, getting caught in what will most likely be known as the worst turkey shoot in history, at least from the turkey's point of view. So yes, Dad, I'm a bit tired, but it's nothing I can't handle. I've been on remote ops too, just like Harpuia and Leviathan. Speaking of which," he pounded his fist into his open palm, a look of grim determination crossing his features. "It's high time we go burn a copy. So take a break. We've got it from here."

"And here I thought I was the only one that could get away with bossing you around," Zero said with a smirk. "He is right, though. Head back and recharge, X."

X tossed a half-hearted glare towards the blonde. "Don't start with that again."

"Lieutenant Commander, you get your sorry, broken ass back to Cyberspace now or I will drag you there_ myself_!" And the look in Zero's eyes left no room for debate about how serious he was.

"Fine," X answered back, a tired exhalation escaping him as he disappeared from view.

Fefnir looked around quickly, saying in a slightly panicked voice, "Oh, _please_ tell me that's supposed to happen..."

* * *

><p>With the network locked down as it was, Aztec had no way of figuring out who the genius behind the sudden monsoon was, and his gaze flickered over the gathered Pantheon units patrolling the perimeter of Neo Arcadia Tower for a moment. General Fefnir had headed out into the city some time before the storm had begun, directing Aztec to simply remain on patrol.<p>

"_Nothing gets inside the Tower."_

The unit's gaze turned to the main gateway, a pair of Pantheon Variables standing at either side. His eyes narrowed, however, at a sudden flicker of light amidst the rain, the impact point of the illumination out of his line of sight. Signaling to a nearby group of Variables, he ordered them forward. If the light had been from Neo Arcadian units, the Pantheons were to escort them to the nearest safe facility. Otherwise, they were ordered to engage with intent to capture.

Teleportation never seemed odd to him, though when he was young and still a newbuilt, it was nearly a work of magic to most humans he encountered. Teleporting in only escalated their fear, as though the Robot Masters were able to bend reality to their will, able to twist it into humanity's worst nightmares. Never mind that it was a _human_ who came up with the tech to begin with.

There'd been rumors, whispers in bars, on street corners, and murmurs in forums on the internet, that the Wilybots would kidnap people, teleport them away never to be heard from again.

It was absurd. What would they do with a human to babysit? No: they were either dealt with directly or utterly ignored, but either way, they were never whisked away. Except for once, the one time Wily actually ordered it. If he recalled, _everyone_ in the room just stared at the aging roboticist, and the disbelief _had_ to be palpable to the human. Incredulity was practically _screaming_ over the Harmony, and it'd taken several long moments before anyone even _moved._ It'd been carried out, of course, but _seriously?_

At least at that point, Enker had other responsibilities that let him off the hook for babysitting Dr. Cossack's daughter. He _still_ felt a bit bad for Shadow and any of the other Numbers that were tasked with looking after her…and enduring her temper.

But now, he had one task to carry out, and Air had even been kind enough to lend some subordinates for ease of execution. It was very simple, and the first step, teleporting in, was already done. Now he need only proceed toward the tower, take out the guards on the outside by force or by surrender, and completely block anyone from entering or leaving. Over the network, Break and Shadow had already locked down all doors to the Tower but one, and that was the front door, and that was the door Enker was headed toward.

The streets were emptied and the rain was pouring down in sheets, the occasional flash of lightning and clap of thunder originating from another part of the city. It took the Wilybot a moment to register that it wasn't the dome's environmental control system that was making all that fuss over there. He pondered the lightning for a few moments more, then decided it wasn't an immediate threat to himself or his mission here. If the outcome of whatever battle was going on proved detrimental to their objective, a contingency would be mapped and executed, and the wrong would be righted.

He was coming up on the Tower now, moving at a brisk jog through the rain, his gold and royal blue armor glinting in the low light, Air's subordinates rank and file behind him, accepting orders from the Third Number without question. The Wilybot's gaze fell on a gaggle of units approaching, each a mirror of the other, and it was plain to see that their weapons were armed. A quick scan and reach over the network brought a frown to Enker's face. They weren't moving the way a fully self-aware unit _should,_ they were moving more like mechaniloid level units, but he was also unable to impose his orders on them. A hybrid of some sort, then? There weren't any access locks left on the network, so that had to be the case. He shifted, his gait slowing as behind him, the Lightning Lords moved forward, overtaking him and moving around and ahead of him, obeying his order to guard him and overtake these mechaniloids.

Aztec was moving for the gate the moment the first of the Pantheons responded that they'd encountered hostile contacts, reminding the units that any enemies were to be captured, not retired. His left arm switched out for the augmented Buster the minute the first of the patrol units sent a systems shutdown alert, little arcs of electricity dancing between the prongs of the weapon.

An order was issued over local wireless, requesting backup from the Fist units stationed nearer the main door of the Tower, as the first of the combatant units cleared the perimeter wall, and Aztec didn't even blink before he fired off a fully-charged shot at the…whatever it was.

The Lightning Lord was nearly cartoonish in its design, but the mechaniloid wasn't _stupid,_ or at least, not comparatively, and it deftly dodged out of the way, Aztec's shot impacting on the ground and cracking the cobbled pathway. The electricity discharged along the soaked ground, but all other units were insulated against shocks, particularly on their boots, so even though the Fan Fiends and Enker himself walked on the ground, none so much as flinched. Enker's eyes did narrow at the attack, however, as he revised his orders to them, adding an addendum, coded openly to help them deal with similar attacks from this opponent. It simply wouldn't do to get the mechaniloids killed, doubly so since they were _Air's_.

"Unidentified units, you are ordered to stand down," Aztec said, his buster already charging. "This is a restricted area of Neo Arcadia. Non-military and hostile units are not allowed on the grounds."

Enker glanced around, noting that there was a number of other mechaniloid units accompanying this unit that just spoke, but as far as he could tell, this other unit was the only other truly self-aware unit there. A lopsided smile crossed the Wilybot's face at that, and rather than heeding Aztec's warning, he strode forward, lolling his staff over one shoulder, catching it in the crook of his elbow as he looked up at the tower, or as high as he could with the rain streaming down. It was an impressive structure, and an impressive city for it to be the crown jewel. Enker's gaze drifted over to Aztec then, the Wilybot still holding himself casually, even if the Fan Fiends and Lightning Lords were in a defensive position around him. "So, we're the same, then," he said, apparently having come to a conclusion. He was quiet a moment, then shook his head, "Well—almost the same. I'm approaching from the other side, of course."

"You do not have access permissions to this location," and Aztec fired a bolt at the ground a few feet in front of Enker. "Halt your advance or I will fire on you," and he considered the unit for a moment before, "I fail to see how an attacking force could be seen as the same as the city defense teams."

"No, no," Enker said, waving his free hand to dismiss Aztec's notion, the units remaining in perfect formation around him. He stepped forward, onto the ground that'd just been cracked by Aztec's shot, both units having to raise their voices slightly to be heard over the din of the rain. "I more meant the subordinates, although," and he frowned over the Lightning Lords, then looked Aztec's Pantheons over. "It'd be a shame to force them to sacrifice themselves when you and I will still battle in the end. Why don't you and I duke it out, leave these ones out of it?" And he motioned over the mechaniloids.

"A bit arrogant to directly challenge a Neo Arcadian lieutenant, don't you think?" Aztec asked, the soft arcs of electricity snapping in the chamber of his armament as a third charge built.

"A lieutenant," Enker repeated, considering the unit. "Fairly high up then, aren't you? We don't have ranks like that," he continued, still holding his staff casually. "But, you completely evaded my question. Would you rather I strip your guard from you first, then?" Because, loathe as he was to kill off the mechaniloids unnecessarily, he _would_ do what he needed to.

"Arrogant and bold, but so be it if combat is your only goal," Aztec said, bringing his weapon to bear on the smaller unit. "I'm supposed to detain anyone that isn't citizenry, but I think I can hold an exception for someone trying to gain access to the Tower," and the electric charge fired, the lieutenant's aim spot-on.

Enker moved in the blink of an eye, bringing his staff up to intercept Aztec's shot. He didn't flinch as the charge impacted, but rather than deal any damage at all to the unit, it merely disappeared the second it impacted the staff. "Don't confuse arrogance with confidence," Enker returned, the staff shifting in his grip so that its tip was facing Aztec. "You will submit to me here, and I will gain control of this tower's access," and with that, he swung the staff, an electric bolt rocketing from its tip as he moved, the powerful arc of energy aimed spot on for Aztec.

The unit's buster switched to its secondary configuration, twin prongs only halfway open when the strike hit, and though Aztec was protected against all but the most powerful of shocks—mostly courtesy of his elemental attributes and his design—the strike impacted hard, several warning notices posting to his peripheral about this unknown unit's attack and the strength of what should have been a reflected attack. "The might of Neo Arcadia does not bow down to those who would bring her harm," and the entirety of the Pantheon teams within Aztec's wireless range were directed to attack the units that had come in with this unknown combatant.

Aztec remained still for only a moment longer before darting along the Tower grounds, pushing closer to his target. Fefnir's orders no longer mattered. This unit needed to be dealt with.

The Fan Fiends and Lightning Lords responded instantly to the wave of aggression, the Lightning Lords taking on some altitude while below, the Fan Fiends took on an offensive formation, charging the Pantheons, whipping up intense winds that blew the pouring rain in all directions, killing off nearly all visibility as the water splashed and misted all around.

Enker, meanwhile immediately darted forward to meet Aztec, staff in hand and ready. Combatants entering battle usually did so with a grim face, but Enker went in with a smile.


	44. Eight Angry Judges

_So, we hit another milestone on this site: 200 reviews! So, before we get into the Author's Notes, we want to say thank you to everyone that has reviewed thus far, and we also want to thank everyone that has contributed to the Hit and Unique Visitor counts. It's a wonderful feeling to know we have so many people who are enjoying our story, even with all the bumps along the road with our update schedule._

_To everyone following Redemption on **Mental Wanderer**,thank you as well. Midnyght does watch the hit/visitor count there too._

_So, the Resistance has begun the siege on Neo Arcadia, five of Wily's units have been called onto the battlefield, Blues has been knocked out cold and dragged before the Council for judgment, and all forces are now converging on Neo Arcadia Tower. Inside the Council Chamber, sealed off from the network and the maelstrom raging outside, another confrontation is about to begin where past meets present, tempers flare, and and Copy X's iron-fisted rule over NA comes to a swift and unexpected end..._

* * *

><p>"I don't see how there's any room for debate," Flizard snapped at Inarabitta. "This unit is a threat, has attacked Neo Arcadia, is likely connected to whatever group is currently tearing its way through the city streets, and needs to be put down before he presents a further risk to any of us."<p>

"The room for debate," Inarabitta fired back, "is that Lieutenant Ourobockle mentioned something in his report, brief though it was, that merits further examination. The unit is restrained and unconscious and you're asking us to retire him off of a single side of the argument!"

"The single side that reduced _two battalions _to scrap metal and has Hyleg in the medical wing until they can reattach his arm?! Inarabitta, this is no time for your childish idealism!" Flizard was out of his chair by now, barely holding back his rage. "Retire him!"

"Not until we've heard his side of the story!" Inarabitta fired back. "Until I hear what he has to say, until I know what led to this attack, until I _know_ why the city is locked down as such, I will take no action against a Reploid life!"

Kelverian and Mantisk moved between the two units, Flizard's eyes burning with barely-contained rage as he glared at Inarabitta. "Settle, both of you," Mantisk said, looking pointedly at Inarabitta. "Both of you are acting like children," he chided. "Now, as much as I am bothered by the concept of what this unit was able to do, Foxtar and Inarabitta do bring up a valid point. There were things said by this unit that merit more than just a unilateral apathy in our judgment, a mindless decision to retire one who may very well have information we could use. I believe, unaffected by the opinions of any other, that we should see if we can get the unit back online and discuss this with him."

Volteel and Kelverian nodded in agreement. "I second the idea," Volteel said. "Yes, there have been losses, and they are devastating to our side, but to throw away information for the sake of a vendetta we have?" A pointed look at Flizard and Hellbat. "Judgment as to his fate will be withheld until _after_ we have heard his side of the story."

Phoenix looked to the unit at his feet, considering the still form. "We may be here for some time," he said, scans still showing that the unit was suffering some odd issue with his core. "There's little to say that he will wake. Considering his age, he may be permanently offline."

"I will not allow the taking of a life when he can raise neither arm nor voice to defend himself," Kelverian said, taking his seat once more. "If we must wait, then we wait."

Copy X's eyes turned to the Judges for a moment before he shook his head, looking back down to the handcuffed unit. "Why does this unit merit special consideration when we have cared so little for the cost of life in the past few years? I say that we be done with him and launch a full offensive counter-attack. Shut down the Resistance once and for all. Claim this one's core for the power plant—perhaps Telesphoros can make use of it," and he frowned a bit at the thought of the carnage that the so-called scientist had left in his wake in Sanctum Yggdrasil.

"This unit," le Cactank said, finally speaking up, "is called a progenitor. I cannot tell from just a surface view how old he truly is, but there is value in the words of those who have seen more than us, who have come before us. Perhaps his eyes see more about our city than our own," and he bowed his head, "though I mean you no offense, Master X."

Copy X barely noticed the comment, waving his hand almost lazily, dismissing the unit's worry.

"If I may," Phoenix said, "perhaps we should call someone up from Medical?" and he poked the unit in the back with one of his talons.

Blues' systems did not anticipate him being in any situation that would call for him being nudged in the small of his back in such a manner. Blues himself wasn't even aware of it for several moments after his systems registered the invasion as a hostile one and began his boot process: he was a combat unit when it was all said and done regardless of what Doctor Light intended for him and so, initializing quickly, quietly, and most importantly, with no visible or audible cues was _essential._

His audio system booted before the visual, but he knew better than to open his eyes, not when he'd fallen while surrounded by enemy units. A quick check with his systems reported that physically, he was fine if he didn't count the core (and it was _never_ in the green, so it didn't count), but his hands were bound behind his back. A quick mental probe confirmed that at this, the Reploids here were smart: it didn't have a digital lock, so he couldn't hack it.

He could hear voices in the room, a great number of them, and once his processors caught up with his base programming, the subject of their debate caused him to run cold for an instant, then hot with rage.

Blues was roughly double Rock's weight, perhaps just a bit under. Rock was double the expected weight of a Reploid his size, and that meant that Blues was also roughly double what a Reploid his size should weigh, perhaps a bit more. Unlike a human, however, his heft didn't leave him weak and tired. Oh, no. Every inch of his construction, every detail Light and later, Wily, added meant that every gram on the unit was strong, durable, with output _maximized_ in every joint. As a lab assistant, he wouldn't have needed to lift anything a human couldn't, but he was still more than capable of tipping a sedan on its side with one arm.

Still more than capable of twisting abruptly, locking his knee and ankle joints in both legs, and catching his captor's legs in a brutal vice. Rather than holding and agonizing the unit over it, he instead closed his legs like a scissors, right at Phoenix's joint, with far more force than a unit his size should be able to produce.

The sound of the unit's knee joints cracking didn't even phase him anymore.

None of the Reploids in the room had noticed the unit coming online until he'd moved and, in a blur, Phoenix was suddenly on the ground beside his prisoner, screaming in pain, and the three Zan'ei posted by the door had drawn their busters on the unit.

"Stand down!" Cubit Foxtar ordered, getting to his feet and moving from the table down to the main floor of the chamber. "Phoenix, offline the relay," he instructed, "and you, whatever your name or number is, it would be wise to stay your aggression against us. We wish to hear what it is that Lieutenant Ourobockle did not relay to us, what it was that you meant by changes to the city."

"Not all of us share your sentiment," Flizard snapped, silenced from continuing by Kelverian's pointed glare.

Foxtar was keeping his distance, even as Phoenix managed to pull himself away from the unit. "If I may ask, what is your name or number?"

Blues was still lying back, had inflicted that damage to Phoenix while on the ground, and when the Reploid fell, he shifted, forcing himself into an upright position despite being unable to use his hands to brace himself. His breathing was a bit rapid as his optics refocused, still being posted with systems messages, with status updates and warnings from that latest attack, and honestly, answering this Reploid that'd come to address him was so far down on the queue that…damn it. His eyes greyed out for a moment as he rebooted his optics, blinking as the world came into focus, this time set to the proper brightness, the apertures in his lenses closing some.

His head was throbbing, a now-familiar pain that always came in the wake of an attack and, he noted, the joint in his right knee was out of alignment, though not severely enough to impede his walking. Yet. He tested the cuffs, blue eyes glancing back as he considered. He might be able to get the cuffs over his head without disengaging one of his shoulder joints, but overall, he'd rather _not_. Those didn't just snap back in place without outside assistance.

It was then that he noticed the bloom of red on his shirt, the still-damp coolants and hydraulic fluids staining much of his clothing. From what he could see, his scarf was more orange than yellow now and he highly doubted that would wash out easily.

He didn't have to see his gloves to know that they weren't salvageable. The right glove, the hand he'd used to disable Ourobockle, was saturated with fluids, still felt damp, and was ripped up in places. His left wasn't faring much better and honestly, he was fortunate that drawing his buster hadn't caused it to break the way it ripped his sleeves up. The armor always came up over it, and that afforded the glove protection from the transformation to the buster.

His pants were more wet than not, and, he realized, that'd have soaked through to his undersuit, so that'd have to go, too.

When his first round of systems checks came back clean, he continued with diagnostics due to an improper powerdown, double-checking his systems for any bugs or improper booting.

"Foxtar, get back," Schilt said. "He's not answering and you're probably within some sort of threat range for him, considering."

"Hellbat, for once in your life, shut up," Foxtar snapped back. He'd seen the way the unit's eyes had refocused, knew that at least one system had had to be rebooted. "You heard Glacier. He's a progenitor. He's old," and he hoped that hadn't sounded as harsh as it seemed. "I think…I think he may still be booting."

"He dropped a lieutenant and his systems aren't even fully geared?" Flizard said, glaring down at Foxtar. "And yet you say he is no threat?!"

Mantisk and Inarabitta were down from the dais a moment later, Mantisk helping Phoenix move to a sitting position that shifted his weight off of his damaged legs.

Moving carefully, slowly, to avoid startling the progenitor unit, Inarabitta moved over to Foxtar, kneeling next to the unit. "Are you okay?" he asked.

"I'm fine, Childre," Foxtar said. "For once in our lives, in this mess the city has become, I just…I want to know what he has to say." _I want to hear a unit we would have condemned to death explain why he raised his arms against our city, why he would risk so much, why courage is worth so much more than his life._

Inarabitta nodded, then looked to the progenitor unit, wide eyes full of worry.

After another moment or two, Blues shifted into a more proper sitting position, his gaze darting around the room, scoping it. Analyzing it. He hadn't missed that the facsimile of X was in the room, still sitting up by the dais, but he pushed that aside for the moment. He reached outward mentally, feeling for the network, but to no avail. This room was shielded, and shielded well. He couldn't call anyone to him this way. Another glance around the room confirmed that there were no mechaniloids he could have slip out with a message.

He'd have suspected they put him here to prevent him from reaching out, but vetoed that, considering that this room was lavish and was probably their normal meeting room. Well, if they had private conversations in here, it only made sense to block network access from within.

And they thought he was taking so long to boot because he was old and not because he'd improperly shut down. That in itself was…

It didn't matter.

"Break," he finally said.

"Pardon?" Flizard asked, looking to the unit.

The cuffed unit turned and looked to Flizard. Despite the exhaustion apparent in his face and the dark circles under his eyes, his expression still managed to communicate some degree of impatience with the Judge. "You requested my designation," and he spoke slowly here, just to be _certain _that Flizard's processor could keep pace with his words, "And it is Break."

Flizard's eyes moved to Magnion's crumpled form, the unit silent only because he was able to offline his pain sensors. "Is that meant to be some kind of joke, progenitor?" he snapped. "I do not think this funny in the least."

"Flizard, silence," Mantisk said. "We asked for his designation and he provided. There is little cause for you to take such a stance against something so simple as a name."

"It's a twisted joke," Flizard shot back. "We don't have time for idle banter such as his."

"Providing us with a name is not idle banter," Volteel corrected. "He simply answered our query, so let us…" and he blinked, shaking his head after a moment. "Let us return to the matter at hand."

Foxtar nodded, thankful for the Judges at least trying to keep Flizard in check. "Are you fully booted yet, Break?" he asked. Manners before business, after all.

Inarabitta, on the other hand, had shrunk back a little from the unit, moving back to his chair a moment later.

"The improper shutdown caused my security systems to ensure a proper boot and repair any glitches during the booting process," Blues replied, though his voice was cold and curt. His face was still pale, though his breathing had evened out and he was flipping through his displays, trying to figure out how much he could shut down without stressing his systems too badly.

"Improper shutdown?" Mantisk asked, looking to Phoenix. "You said there was an issue with his core that caused him to offline."

"The shutdown was caused by the Variable unit's stun rod making contact with the back of my neck," Blues snapped in reply, his gaze falling on Phoenix for an instant before refocusing directly ahead of him.

Kelverian's gaze switched over to Phoenix, no longer concerned for the unit's broken knees. "You lied in an official report. Or omitted the truth. Whichever excuse that you intend to submit ."

"It was not a measure that merited notice," Phoenix returned.

"It was an omission," Biblio echoed. "And an electric stun rod to the back of the neck to a unit already in distress? It more that merits documenting in your official logs."

Foxtar ignored the discussion that started behind him, between Mantisk and Magnion, seating himself more comfortably on the floor near Blues. "Lieutenant Ourobockle reported that you mentioned something about improvements to be made to the city? We already have someone looking into correcting the issues with the power plant, but I am still interested in hearing what you have to say."

"Your power plant has nothing physically wrong with it," Blues replied, his gaze focusing on Foxtar. "It's been sabotaged."

"Sabotaged?" le Cactank asked, incredulous. "But Telesphoros said that the coding errors were corrected."

"If there is nothing physically wrong, though," Kelverian said, his head ticking to the side, "then we shouldn't need the amplification mechanism—"

"Enough!" Copy X roared, getting to his feet. "You attack my city, retire units in my military, claim us in the wrong and simply expect us to play nice because you managed to make two of our lieutenants cry?" He snorted. "Tell us what you're really here for, Resistance traitor."

"Resistance? I am not a part of any 'resistance'." Blues responded, turning his head to look up to the Copy. Really, he was more of an outside contractor to them. "As for who betrayed whom, _you_ were the one to draw first blood."

"We drew first blood?" Copy X sneered. "Who was it that locked down our network, first attacked my city? Who gave us no option but to protect our own? You spit nothing but lies, so tell us why you're _really_ here. There must be something you and your pitiful little band are after."

As impassive as his facial expression had initially seemed, it turned out that Blues had actually been _humoring_ the Copy up until this point. Something in the young unit's words, however, managed to annoy the Robot Master enough that his countenance changed, minute though it was. It was more than clear that displeased as he'd been with his situation before, he'd been only just that: displeased. But at the Copy's words, his demeanor shifted, and it was apparent that his patience with him was quickly waning. "_Your_ city?" And Blues made a point of looking around the Council Chamber before turning back to Copy X, his blue gaze boring into the unit. "You know, it isn't prudent to break your toys."

"Yes, _my_ city," Copy X responded. "The hope Neo Arcadia represents may belong to all her people, but _I_ am her guardian, her keeper. _I_ am the one responsible for saving what's left of this world. You and those like you, vilifying what I have done, defaming my work…" and he shook his head, the anger evident in his scarlet gaze. "I seek to correct all that is wrong with this city, save her, save_ us_, and yet what do I get in return? You, attacking my city. The Resistance, claiming _three_ of my Guardians, ripping apart the mind of the fourth because of it. You_ dare_ to claim I'm breaking_ anything_?" A soft, dismissive sound at that. "You, _Break_, it's those like you that are bringing this world to ruin. You and your ilk are the ones treating us like toys, tearing apart all we've ever hoped for."

"You seek to correct it." And Blues looked around the room again, apparently mulling that information over. "You say I am vilifying what you've done. That I'm defaming your work. You must be proud, claiming sponsorship of this city. Ordering things repaired and expecting everyone around you to do all of the thinking, having everyone do all of the work. And then things don't go as you imagined. So you have units retired to cover yourself. Yes. You are a fine guardian indeed."

"I have had units retired because they challenged the laws of my city. If you haven't noticed, a city this large cannot remain as a symbol of hope and peace without there being an underlying order, a strict and controlled system by which it is managed and maintained," Copy X explained. "The goal for this city was to be the residence of all that remains of humanity and Reploidkind until we could repair the world outside of the Eden Dome."

Schilt nodded at this. "Despite the laws and regulations you seem so willing to flaunt, Break, we acknowledge, albeit begrudgingly, that until we can put a permanent end to the Maverick threat, the Reploids here must be constrained, must be controlled. By placing restrictions on the units regarding their jobs, their assignments within this city, by ordering them to reign in their emotional programming, by giving them numbers instead of names, we are able to ensure order, compliance, place units where we need when we need them. To take a name, to let emotion reign over logic, to act outside of one's place," and Schilt looked down for a moment before continuing, "It gives us a means by which to monitor the ones susceptible to the virus' influence."

"And given time," Mantisk added, "we will see the unit at the heart of the crisis repaired, returned to her true form, see an end to this bloodshed, this iron-fisted control we've had no choice but to instate, and we will begin to reach back out to the dying world. We will see hope rekindled yet."

"An honorable cause, I suppose," Blues mused, then quoted, "'He who quells disorder by a few signal examples will, in the end, be the more merciful.' It is true that for a city this large, there must be laws, and punishment for those that break the laws. But tell me, don't you think it off that so many are put down? I've seen your statistics. Such numbers are those I associate with names like Himmler. Don't think I don't see what this is. You've rounded them all into a nice pen, are working them like animals, and when they don't fit the mold you've _imposed_ on them, you bring them around for the slaughter. What you've been doing here has a name," and Blues' gaze was centered on Copy X. "Genocide."

Several of the Judges flinched at that, Inarabitta and Mantisk both turning their gazes to the table, while Biblio, Kelverian, and le Cactank rested back in their chairs, and even Flizard, usually unfazed by what had become nearly daily routine, remained silent.

"It is a strong word to use to condemn what we have done," Biblio said, his voice hiding none of the hurt he felt, "but what else can we do? There is _no cure_ for the virus as it is now, no way of saving the units lost, and if even one is allowed to survive within the city walls, the plague will spread like it did a century ago, will claim every Reploid that calls this city home, and how then can we protect anyone? Even we are not immune."

"None retain the immunity but me," Copy X said. "By whatever miracle that AXR-003 has remained sane, I know not, but the others? Fallen like the rest. Consumed by the very thing we are fighting to end, the very reason this city sees such high numbers retired."

Inarabitta could only cringe at the way Master X referred to his only remaining child, the tone of his voice when he spoke of those he'd lost, and the argument the two had had played again in his mind.

"So you're putting units to death because they _may_ be infected? Or are you hiding behind the fear the virus instills in the population here to justify your actions?" Blues admittedly had no experience with units that actually were infected, but he'd read the Resistance's full database in the weeks he'd spent there, so that at least gave him a leg to stand on. "My words are harsh and they are warranted by your harsh and needlessly violent actions. And you have the audacity to be upset that there is a group strong enough, willful enough to stand against you? In the face of all of the pain, grief, and fear you've caused in this city you claim to be guarding, you have the audacity to blame me for your hardships? You stand here, the city falling down around you, and you're _ordering your technicians executed?_ You stand here, causing more pain and grief than anyone in their right mind would ever want to see over ten lifetimes, and you have the gall to try and _justify and excuse yourself?"_

"Would you warrant instead that we wait until we know for _certain_ that they are infected?" Copy X asked. "You would have us be reactive rather than proactive, but by waiting, how many more lives would be lost? You would have me languish in sentimentality, in the delusion of such a dangerous 'maybe', let them retain their lives while they willfully challenge the laws? Tell me, Break, if this Council does not keep to the laws that we have put in place, allow for a unit to stand in opposition, how long before another Resistance is created? How long before civil unrest sets Neo Arcadia aflame?"

Flizard perked up at mention of the technicians, bristling a bit. "You are woefully misinformed, progenitor, if you think it was by our command that Guardian Phantom murdered those nine units. Or do you not understand the way the virus twists the units it claims? The 'pain and grief' you claim to see units suffering would be nothing compared to an outbreak, an epidemic within. We do not need to justify _anything _to anyone, least of all you."

"You are nothing more than a little tyrant," Blues informed Copy X. "This city is a toy to you, its people useless pawns. The city would be better off with a sack of flour in your place. And you," Blues' gaze turned to the Judges' dais at that, his gaze boring over each of them in turn, "are just as accountable. By enabling him, you've stained your hands with the blood of every innocent killed. A unit with any sort of true experiential data," and his gaze returned to Copy X, hard and cold, "would see that."

"Better to stain our hands and retire innocents than risk a single Maverick running rampant in our city," Flizard snapped back. "And _true _experiential data? Master X has three hundred _years_. We enable only that which will save this city."

"You're so afraid of that virus, so afraid of what those centuries of war have whispered to you, that you cannot see what is right before you. You don't need a Maverick running rampant to burn this city to the ground-you're already doing it yourselves." Blues shifted then, got to his feet, his clothing still saturated in coolant as he spoke to everyone in the room. "A king without a kingdom is nothing but a fool on a throne. And what a fool you've crowned." He looked to Copy X then. "A child, crying that resources are low, carelessly tossing away the single most valuable asset this city has in favor of 'saving' your sabotaged power plant. It's plain to me, but none of you seem to have seen it. Less than half a decade, newbuilt. Your lack of experience is stark and unsettling."

Foxtar had gotten to his feet the moment Break had, his body language tense, alert. "Master X is no newbuilt, Break," he clarified. "Are you sure your memories weren't compromised in the offline?"

"Watch your tongue," Schilt snapped, glaring at Break. "Foxtar, for your own safety, step away."

Copy X, however, shuddered a bit beneath the progenitor's penetrating stare, his eyes hiding none of his fear, none of his worry at the fact that this unit_ knew_. "You _dare_ to speak to me that way? Were I to take your counsel, progenitor, it would spell certain doom for this city. You claim I'm discarding resources, acting like a child, yet what have you done to help this city? What have you done for Neo Arcadia? You shut our city down, stripped us of control over the patrol units, walked away from this city with something that would only help a power plant you claim has been sabotaged. The blood of hundreds of dead is on your hands, Break. The pain suffered by the human families rests on you _alone_."

"Pain?" And Blues' tone was accusing, "Anguish? What would you know of these things? Coddled here your entire life, your every desire sated, your every whim met? What would you know of the pain of the ones you've condemned to death? You're safe on that throne, wearing that jester's crown…it was easy, wasn't it? A wave of your hand, a single word and their lives-extinguished. But you never drew your Buster on them, did you? You never took responsibility, not then, not today. And you never will. This city was _never_ yours." Blues shifted then, frowning to the unit. "There is a great deal that I _will_ do to this city, and the improvements marked will be apparent within a matter of _hours_, newbuilt." Blues paid next to no mind to Foxtar or Schilt. "What I _have_ done for this city was ensure you didn't blow yourselves up playing with technology you _don't understand._ What I _have_ done for this city is take its reins from a stubborn, spoiled child. The patrol units were a product of your own incompetence. Did it ever occur to you to actually spend some time having these engineers be_ taught?_ Or do you hate this city and its people so much that you're intentionally holding it back? Oh, but no, you're its _guardian,_ are you not? In that case…it must just be blatant stupidity."

Copy X visibly trembled, earning more than a few surprised looks from the Judges, and his voice wavered as he struggled to keep eye contact with the unit. "Those who are put into roles as technicians and programmers _are_ taught," and the replicate shook his head. "If you knew anything about my city, you'd know this. Yes, those nine responsible for the Pantheons and Golems made very critical mistakes, but it was a Maverick who retired them, not this Council, not_ me_."

"I've seen the remedial texts you supply those units with. Most of it can simply be installed. You cannot install life experience. Data is not wisdom. There's a simple flow that humans have known for centuries: data becomes information, which in turn becomes knowledge. Knowledge becomes wisdom, given time. All you are giving these units is textbook. Data. What to do under normal conditions, but never what to do under…abnormal conditions." Just like how Copy X couldn't know what to do under the conditions he'd found himself in. When Blues looked at him, he saw _him,_ not that beloved Master X, not that ideal he never seemed able to reach. "Do you know why Aristotle taught, in his manner of ethics, to question everything?" He didn't give Copy or anyone in the room a chance to respond. "Because it is only by questioning that we learn. It is only through curiosity that we apply new things. And it is only by questioning that we can discern right from wrong. You've asked me why I've attacked your city. The answer is that initially, I did _not._ Had you anyone competent on your staff, you'd have seen that what I carved was an escape route for us. It was your own incompetence that led to those guard units attacking innocents in the streets. It was your order to stifle curiosity-to stifle _learning_-that sealed their fates."

"Us?" Foxtar asked then, having returned to his seat.

"Why an escape route?" Mantisk asked. "What would a progenitor model have to fear from the city?"

The Copy looked absolutely petrified, Blues noted, as his razor-sharp gaze turned from Foxtar to bore into Mantisk. "That order to vivisect _me_ aside," and Blues paused for a moment, pondering how to best word this part. He settled on using terms they'd relate to, terms a Reploid would understand, "This child," and he tilted his head toward Copy X for a moment in lieu of gesturing toward him with one arm, "Ordered _my younger brother_ scrapped, his solar core sent to R&D, his parts placed _into me_ so that I may live while he dies."

Half of the Council looked visibly sickened, disbelief in their gazes at the thought of what had been done without any mention being made of these events after the progenitor had fled the city.

Inarabitta, however, was trembling in his seat, though it wasn't fear that shook him so. "Cannibalized for…" and he was on his feet, his quiet temperament giving way to sickened rage. "How dare anyone claim Break is to be retired for his actions when something of that magnitude was done with no authorization or notice to the Council?!" his ice blue eyes locked on Copy X. "You bear the right to act without council, Master X, but to condemn a unit to death so that his parts are given to another? Not even in the worst years of the Maverick Wars was anyone but _Sigma_ known for such cruelty!"

"You watch what you say—"

"No!" Inarabitta lashed out, cutting Flizard off. "You know I speak the truth! Master X lost _how many _of his comrades, his friends, during the Maverick and Elf Wars, and yet none ever took the heart of one to restore another! Resources were tighter during the latter years of the Elf Wars then they are now and none stooped to such barbarianism!"

Mantisk moved to Inarabitta's side then, hands resting on the smaller Reploid's shoulders, though his own gaze was laced with disgust and questioning as he turned to Copy X. "Inarabitta is right, Master X. For there to have been two progenitor models, two units from the past somehow brought to us now…"

Copy X's voice was soft and trembling when he spoke. "What I did in that lab was for the benefit of the city," and eyes that had turned to the Judges focused back on Blues. "It is only by sheer luck after your departure that another came forward with a plan to help fix this city, with something that finally brought us hope. You are nothing more than a piece of history, Break," and the unit's voice began to fill with malice, "and you should have remained forgotten, left in the past where you belong. Old as you are, broken as you were before we repaired you, using resources meant for _our_ citizens with no guarantee that we would have been able to revive either of you, and this is the thanks we are given?" Copy X sneered. "How _dare_ you."

"You impudent little brat," and had he not been shackled, Blues would be _disciplining_ this child. "You expect thanks after a such a repair effort? You expect thanks after attempting to retire a _child_? And what benefit to the city could we have been to you dead, pray tell? Do you think your departments would have been able to glean any real _knowledge_ from our systems when they aren't allowed to look at anything but the subject assigned to them? Did you expect any of that stumbling in the dark to happen in any sort of _timely_ manner? You could have booted _either_ of us and asked—I have his core schematics on file as well. Had you the sense to make a proper investment, we'd have given you those schematics and _so much more._"

Behind his back, his fists had clenched with rage and he took a moment to force himself to relax, his hands relaxing, his body aching. He couldn't afford another systems upset, not here. "Instead, you turned a blind eye to the boon—haven't you heard never to look a gift horse in the mouth? Well, here we are, but you're the one burning the city. All over what, a power plant that, once again, had you _allowed those in the field to study a comprehensive subject set,_ may have realized that you've had wool pulled over your eyes for the past four years? There's nothing _wrong_ with your power plant. Nothing except that someone's been _sabotaging_ it."

"Not anymore," and that was Schilt who spoke up. "That may have been what was wrong, but it won't be much longer. We've _had_ a scientist, a technician, come forward with a means to both repair the plant and end the Maverick crisis. The Dark Elf purged, the Maverick threat ended, the power plant repaired—all we need now is time, Break."

"I cannot condone Break's retirement," Mantisk said. "So much of what he says is true, and so much more…if the hope that Telesphoros has given us was not in vain, then the locks on our citizens will not remain much longer."

"He's a threat!" Flizard fired back. "Look what he's done to our military, to—"

"He is a threat only to those who threaten him," Mantisk cut off, his voice calm and even despite his internal turmoil.

"I second," Inarabitta said, earning a nod from both Biblio and Foxtar. "Master X, I cannot begin to understand why you would throw away someone from the past that could offer so much to our future, not when you've always valued the lessons of those that have come before."

"He is part of a past that no longer matters," Copy X replied.

Mantisk's entire countenance shifted at that, and the gaze that fell on the unit was one of controlled fury. "I told you when you returned from your diagnostic four years ago, when you began this shift in the laws, that I would not bring more harm to this city and her people than was necessary for her continued protection. The blades of my scythes were dulled as a symbol of that vow." His tone was sharp, his composure firm. "But it was not a diagnostic you were undergoing, was it?" and he pushed himself to his feet, moving from behind the dais to stand nearer Blues. "Zan'ei, stand down."

"Sir, we're here under orders from General—"

"My authority, by _Master X's _judgment, supersedes his. The six of you are _ordered_ to stand down." He hadn't missed the way the ones closer to the door had let their hands drift toward their sheathed weapons as the argument had continued on. "Now tell me," and his gaze locked on Copy X, "how you can so idly call Break a 'part of a past that no longer matters' when I recall Master X once saying that by refusing to acknowledge our past, we serve only to doom all hope we may have for the future?"

"Have you gone mad?" Flizard asked, his tone and gaze incredulous. "You're siding with a Maverick!"

"So do you, by following that thing we have thought to be our leader," Mantisk fired back before retuning his attention to the replicate. "Or is there another reason you returned bearing the eyes of one infected? We thought it simply a side effect of your work, immune though you're supposed to be."

Copy X shrunk back a little from Mantisk's question, no answer coming forth, nothing but vehemence and confusion mixing within him.

A moment passed before Copy X gave a silent signal to the Zan'ei. Judge Mantisk's authority might have trumped Fefnir's, but none trumped _his_.

"No," and Inarabitta was out of his chair, on the table, and the stealth units nearest Mantisk found themselves pinned to the walls behind them, shards of ice having torn through their arms and frozen them in place. "You are no longer the Master X we were created to counsel. Whether infected or not, something has changed you."

"Did we not just discuss with Guardian Fefnir yesterday the threat of letting emotion rule over logic?" Schilt asked, his gaze drifting between Inarabitta and Mantisk. "Yet here you both are, raising weapons against our own, standing against the one remaining hope in this city?"

"Whoever he wants to claim to be," and Mantisk's gaze was cold, "he is not our hope. Not any longer."

When Biblio moved from his seat to stand near Inarabitta, Foxtar doing the same, Copy X's eyes narrowed, though the way his frame shook, it was clear that there was more fear in him than anything else at that moment. "My Council stands divided against _me_?" he asked, hating how broken his voice was, how evidently scared he was.

While it was easy to imagine Blues taking some satisfaction from the Copy's obvious discomfort, there was no note of spiteful glee in his face, in his voice as he considered the young Reploid. "Ah, they've never spoken freely to you, have they? All of them, afraid of the child's tantrums. We won't be having any more of that. You can scream and cry all you'd like; from today, your demands no longer carry any weight. They may have catered to you, but I will _not."_

And despite him being shackled, down on the floor and covered in coolant, in that moment, Blues seemed to be the tallest unit in the room. "I've no doubt you've noticed that despite quarantining me up here, you've yet to regain control of the network. They won't be returning it. You've already lost this fight." And still, there was no malice in his voice, merely a statement of fact. There was no fear for his own life, no fear of his own fate. And none of that stemmed from feeling self-assured that he'd emerge unscathed. No, he was still standing before them, very much aware that his fate was not so certain regardless of how the Judges had begun to vote.

* * *

><p>So, the Eldest wasn't in the prison blocks. They'd canvassed so far outward in the manufacturing district that they were no longer in it. They'd even reached down to the mechaniloids positioned in Sub Arcadia, querying for any data they may have. None of their logs were relevant to the search.<p>

Shadow clearly wanted to recheck the prison levels, but panicked as he was, he wasn't thinking clearly. Air sent a placid feeling along the link to try to placate the younger Wilybot as he considered.

Metal's voice came clear over their link, _'__If they did not detain him in the cell blocks, it's possible that they've foregone that step altogether. Where do they take prisoners for questioning or judgment?_'

Hindsight really was 20/20. Air could almost feel Shadow facepalming on the other end of the link, and he sent an order to the platform he was on to ascend higher. He pulled up the floor plans for the Tower once again, this time flipping higher in the tower. Barracks, offices, the _entire_ government was centered in this edifice. That meant that their interrogation chambers and courtrooms had to be in here, too.

Well, court_room_. There was only one, it looked like, or at least, only one that political prisoners or dissenters were hauled off to. He ascended more sharply and called about twenty of his robots to him. He wasn't certain the Eldest was there, but if they had discussions about the city there, it might be shielded against network activity and honestly, it was the only place they _hadn't _looked.

Air reached across the tenuous link with X once again, to let the android know of their conclusion and the subsequent plan he was about to execute, and had his face been more mobile, his brow would have furrowed in concern. The unit was nowhere to be found. There was no signal or link. He posted that data to Elec to see if the Lightbot knew why X was missing in action, but didn't wait for a response before moving forward. They may not have the time to spare waiting, and he'd rather not leave these things to chance.

* * *

><p>"It'd take forever to explain the how, but yeah," Zero assured Fefnir, "that is supposed to happen. While he's in Cyberspace, he's recovering his expended and lost energy, and he should be fine there until we're able to build him a new body. He jumps back out within a saber's swing of me again, though, and I'm dragging him back there and personally ensuring he <em>stays<em>."

Fefnir was now openly confused. "And you would pull this off...how?" The last time he checked, he was damn sure Reploids were unable to physically enter Cyberspace, with little (and very specific) exception.

"Your father's not the only one that can pull off an Elf manifestation," Zero clarified. "Technically, I did it before he did when I jumped bodies last century."

"And who'd be looking after your body in the interim?" Harpuia asked.

Zero ticked his head toward Phantom. "Ninja's got to know a few good hidey-holes in the city, and that says nothing for his information network."

There was a bit of a smirk on Phantom's face at that, but the mirthful expression quickly gave way to a frown. "Now that you mention that network, Master Zero…" and the unit turned around. " PZ-153, you'd have failed your covert ops testing like that!" he called out suddenly. "I need to have a word with you!"

Somewhat abashed by her commanding officer's words, the Zan'ei unit stepped out of the shadows of one of the nearby buildings, her approach brisk but unhurried. "I'd have thought you'd have tried a little less direct of an approach on your brother, considering how he behaves some days," she noted. "You certainly left him quite the mess in the process."

"153, had I thought I'd have been able to get him out without setting off more alarms than a good ninja should, I would have. Harpy and Levi just proved to be less risky targets," Phantom countered, his frown deepening.

"A note or a message would have been relayed," she said, her voice bordering on a snap. "Apologies for being so direct, General, but it needed to be said by someone. And if all goes well with this, I'd appreciate it if you dropped the number."

It took a moment for Phantom to double-check his personnel files and figure out if this unit even _had_ a name prior to Copy X's rule. "Even with this issue with my uncle's offline, Heather, I doubt that we'll be seeing Copy X still in power by sundown."

Even with everything that had happened since the events in the desert, he still instantly recognized the unit that had embraced him when he had nearly lost what sanity he could be counted as having. "You're the one that's been following me, huh? I have to say, I didn't expect you'd be the one they'd…wait a minute, relay a message? You mean to tell me _you're_ with the Resistance as well?" He pressed the palm of his hand against his face, smiling at the irony. "Double agents. I should have known. Even _I_ think that's a good covert tactic, although what I consider to be a good stealth technique is probably the dictionary term of a bad idea. Still, that does explain how they've been one step ahead from the start. Good thing too, or who knows how much more damage Captain Screwloose might have done to this city." He chuckled softy, and then returned to the matter at hand. "Come on, runt. Leave the lady alone. It's not like it's easy to sneak around when there's stuff blowing up everywhere."

Heather raised three fingers on one hand. "One of three in the Zan'ei. There's a handful more spread out through the city of course, though we've been the ones tasked with relaying data to the Resistance," and she smiled softly at Fefnir. "Glad you managed to keep quiet for the past day. Copy had the Zan'ei stealth piggyback on your signal. Whatever you did in the Council Chamber yesterday has him more on edge than we've seen since he took control."

"That would more than likely be because I openly told him I was basically going to come back and deal with him after all this blew over." He shot a mischievous grin in her direction. "And hey, look; now I'm going to go deal with him!" He tapped his face near his eyes. "That's why I've got my eyes like this. They stay green 'till he's gone." He gave a pointed look to his brothers. "_Somebody_ had to hold up Dad's legacy around here. Think about how messed up it is that it turned out to be me."

She nodded, still smiling, then turned to Phantom. "With your permission, General, I'd like to round up the rest of the city's Resistance agents and start doing what we can to help out."

"Round 'em up," Zero cut in, "but stick to the residential areas and whatever facilities may still be occupied. I don't know if we'd have been able to get everyone to safety with the time frame we were working with."

It was evident by the way her eyes refocused that Heather had _just_ caught on to the identity of the newcomer to the group, but she was quick to quell her surprise and salute the blond. "Understood, Lieutenant Commander."

"Get going," and he turned to the three AXRs. "We need to head for the Tower. If my family's been called in, it's likely they've already secured the building. We'll need to support them against whatever Copy X has between him and us."

Harpuia hadn't moved far from Fefnir's side since their father had left for Cyberspace, and the expression on his face was one of pride. "And to think, all these years you kept telling us that you never wanted to be a hero, and yet here you are now." A soft chuckle escaped him. "Nice to see you finally let what I said all those years ago sink in."

As they began to move out, Fefnir shot his brother a dark look. "This isn't heroics. It's revenge." He turned his attention to his youngest sibling. "Tell me, Phantom, how many Reploids have you had to retire in the last four years? How much coolant is on our collective hands? And all the while, we simply _let_ it happen. We were so convinced that the…_thing_ that had passed itself off as our father knew what was best, that he had centuries of experience. We never questioned his orders to his face. We never doubted his plans. _We never confronted him._ So these last four years, all the nightmares that the people and Reploids of this city have been going though, all the needless retirements, they're all_ our fault too._ So I don't know about you, but to hell with trying to make him stand down. It's retirement time; with extreme prejudice."

Zero considered Fefnir for a moment before walking over to the Reploid and settling his hands on the unit's shoulders. "I agree that what's been done here in the last four years isn't something that can idly be forgiven or forgotten, but simply retiring Copy X and calling it a job well done isn't fixing what's broken here. Let's head to the Tower. From there, we'll assess the situation, see what needs to be done or find out where we'll be of most use to the efforts, and we'll do what needs to be done to get Neo Arcadia back to where your father meant it to be." He batted Fefnir against the side of his helmet, a gentle chiding motion, before stepping away. "You shouldn't let your anger control your judgment like that. You'd risk acting as Maverick as the unit wearing your father's face."

Fefnir stood in stunned silence at that last remark. As much as he had been trying over the last few days to gain some semblance of control over his temper, he had let his shame at his own actions over the last four years blind him to the very lesson he had learned so painfully mere hours before: _all_ life is precious. Not just the humans; not just the lives that had been extinguished by the order of some kid who had no idea what he was doing; not just the sacrifices that had been made fighting a Resistance that had fought tooth and nail to restore Doctor Light's legacy to its rightful place at the forefront of the final bastion of peace, harmony, and hope. Everyone deserved to live. "I'm sorry," he finally managed. "I've got my own past to own up to, my own crimes to pay for. These last four years are as much my own fault as anyone else's. He'll have his chance. Maybe if he has a chance to chill out for a while, he can learn to be a better person."

That seemed to appease Zero, the blond nodding. "Let's get a move on."

* * *

><p>"Flizard, <em>stand down<em>," Kelverian ordered.

"No," and the Judge's white armor began to take on a deeper hue, red flecked along the edges in a pale orange-hued gold. "I will not back down when Maverick units challenge the safety of this city's ruler."

"He is _not_ who he claims to be!" Mantisk fired back. "Whoever he is, he is _not Master X!_"

Foxtar moved then, putting himself between Flizard and Mantisk, his own armor taking on a lustrous gold hue. "It's ill-advised to play with fire. You might end up getting burned."

"You think yourself able to challenge _me_?"

Foxtar snarled, stepping back into a defensive stance.

"Both of you, stop this foolishness!" Biblio said, reaching out to set a hand on the vulpine unit's shoulder.

"You would consider _this_ foolishness?" Flizard challenged. "Our mandate is to protect this city against those that would destroy it, to purge any and all who carry the taint of the virus."

"We are not infected!" Inarabitta shouted, staying close to Mantisk, away from the two fire users on the Council. "We are no more Maverick than you!"

"Guardian Phantom was no more Maverick than me when he retired the programmers!" came Flizard's response.

"Hellbat, are you just going to stand there and let this continue?" Mantisk asked.

"I am not the one standing at the side of a unit who has done nothing but attack Master X. Perhaps he is right in saying that this unit is not the same X as we have known, but nothing yet proves to me that Master X does not simply suffer from the weight of three centuries of horrors piled upon atrocities."

"No," Mantisk said, shaking his head. "When the changes were instated, when our people became nothing more than numbers, when a charge of infection was based on such trivialities, _we should have known!_"

"All of you, stay your aggression!" le Cactank said then, looking to each of the other seven in turn. "Rather than letting our abilities and our skills determine who is right, instead of letting this argument divide us, why do we not instead find out which side is right?"

"And by what means do you think you can _divine_ the truth, Glacier?" Schilt challenged.

"A simple question," the portly Judge responded.

"A single question cannot end the affliction of the virus!" Flizard challenged. "It will not set those lost to right!"

It was evident in his body language that le Cactank was paying the unit no mind, his gaze on Copy X rather than Flizard. "Tell me this, Master X—if you are who you purport to be, if you truly are X, then what is the reason for you to be breaking your own law?"

"Pardon?" Schilt asked, looking to le Cactank. "What law has he broken? I'd more say that those who have armed themselves and allowed this argument to continue, heeding emotional responses and their personal feelings, are the ones truly doing the most damage."

The Judge shook his head, considering the two units who had sided with Master X before looking back to the city's ruler. "I do not mean the laws regarding the emotional locks, although those are selfsame locks you chided Fefnir for ignoring. No, rather I am referencing the Reploid Viral Infection Symptom Identification Act."

"That was explained four years ago as a side effect of my—"

"But it was _not_ explained," le Cactank cut off the unit. "We just surmised as such and when you didn't argue, we let it be."

Copy X's eyes narrowed threateningly at that. "I don't appreciate your tone."

"I don't believe any of the eight of us appreciate finding out from Break that you're not who you claim to be, nor do we appreciate discovering that our general lack of questioning regarding your decisions has led to the deaths of so many units when, truly, were any of those deaths required?"

"Death was never the answer," Mantisk said, referencing Fefnir's argument from the day before. "That the only Guardian remaining has seen through your farce before we did…" and his voice drifted.

"It is unforgivable that we have allowed something like this to happen under the pretense of law, the guise of protection," Foxtar finished, his eyes still trained on Flizard despite the upset tone of his voice, the fact that his words weren't aimed at just the one Reploid.

"That it is," le Cactank agreed, moving away from the dais then, down to the floor where the others had moved, serving as both a sign of their defection from this unit's lead and as a shield between the remaining Judges and Copy X.

As the Judges began descending from the dais, divided in light of this new information, Blues took a few steps back, ensuring to keep his distance from these units. Even if he'd managed to sway them to begin to believe that the Copy may not be who he claimed to be, that did not make them any less of a threat to him, particularly with his hands bound as such.

Skilled as he may be in close-quarters, he could not realistically expect to take on any number of armed and armored units while he was severely handicapped.

There was a dark, saturated smear of coolant on the marble floor where he'd been seated, the porous material welcoming the stain, and his sensors were indicating that while it'd been a little bit since his fight in the manufacturing district, his clothing was still somewhat damp. His head had been throbbing since he woke to Phoenix poking him in the back, and his extremities ached in the aftermath of the core attack.

At least his diagnostics reported that no truly worrisome damage had been inflicted internally.

What was really beginning to irk him, outside of the Copy's behavior and the argument that'd sparked on the floor, was that despite the unrest, no one had stepped outside to send a message or perhaps call someone up to mediate. Blues honestly didn't care about who came up here or why, but he _did_ care about the door opening and breaking the seal in the room.

It'd be awfully convenient if he could get a message out in the moments the door was open.

This entire debacle was proving to be anything other than convenient.

"This does not need to escalate to violence," Kelverian said, stepping a little closer to Flizard.

"It already has," Schilt intoned darkly, looking to the PZ units still secured to the wall by Inarabitta's spears of ice.

"I was defending the progenitor from the thing parading as Master X," Inarabitta fired back.

"Fefnir spoke of his own emotional suffering," Mantisk said, resting a hand on Inarabitta's back, reassuring the smaller Judge, "and yet the only time we have seen Master X show any emotion, it is anger at those closest to him not acting as he would think proper, hatred for a member of the past so long lost to us. If nothing else, we should have known from his behavior that this is not who he appears to be."

"You trust the words of a Maverick?" Schilt asked.

"Better the word of a Maverick who would seek to save our city than one who would let it burn beneath his impetuousness and naivety."

"And you say that I am a fool?" Copy X sneered at Blues. "How quickly my own turn against me because of simple words, trusting someone like—"

"We no longer owe you allegiance," Mantisk snapped back. "Had I not dulled the blades of my scythes, they would be at your throat even now."

"You would _threaten me_?" and Copy X took a cautious step back, looking to the three Judges still near him. "To think that the crisis would reach the pinnacle of my city, my own council," and his eyes narrowed as he looked back to Mantisk. "I am keeper and guardian of Neo Arcadia, and as such, will protect it from all who would bring her harm. Deathtanz Mantisk, I judge you Maverick."

"A Maverick," Blues finally spoke up from where he was keeping a wary distance from the agitated Reploids, "is a unit infected by the Maverick Virus. The only physical symptom of which, if I recall, is red optics. Red optics that they cannot recode to another color. That said, you hardly have a case by which to call me Maverick. Or your Judge, for that matter." And Blues' sharp blue eyes were riveted on Copy X. "Someone dissenting against _your_ word does not a Maverick make. Your inability to make such a crucial distinction is what's led this city straight down its track to hell."

"My word is _law_," Copy X fired back.

"And how quick you are," Flizard added, "to cite the RVISIA legislation when there were units in the later years of the Maverick crisis who were as such of their own free will, slipped under the radar because all that was sought were their traditional red eyes."

"Those that turned against humanity during the Tenth Rebellion," Foxtar retorted, "were never said to be such of their own volition. Each of them carried within a fraction of the core coding of the Sigma unit. If you knew your history, you'd know that the optics coding was not included within their DNA libraries."

"The optics programming was not immediately effected," Inarabitta reminded. "A unit could go weeks infected before it was physically apparent. That was just the sign needed to verify without having a unit undergo intensive scanning."

"And that is why the slightest deviation, however trite, earned a unit their Order of Retirement," Flizard snapped. "And Master X has passed his judgment." Flizard's tail snapped out, slamming into an unsuspecting Kelverian and sending him careening into the wall. Hissing, the Judge reached for the wide collar around his neck, the tips of the five individual panels of his frill igniting as he removed it, the flaming wheel sent straight for Blues.

Foxtar moved the moment the weapon left Flizard's hand, putting himself in the way of the attack as he tried to catch the projectile, his own fire chip coming online to help buffer the damage the flames would otherwise inflict.

Blues had already leapt gracefully back, his motions fluid and practiced despite the way he was shackled, and even had Foxtar not intercepted, the blow would have missed the Robot Master. "Cowardly," he snapped, his glare leveled on Flizard, "To attack a unit with no means to defend himself. Or is this the only way for you to best others?"

Foxtar couldn't help but to grin at that comment, one hand wrapped around the center ring of Flizard's frill, holding the weapon steady as the edges were still spewing small flames. Turning his head, he was a bit shocked to find the progenitor unit so far away, though he didn't let the surprise show on his features.

Biblio's helmet had shifted color a bit in response to Flizard's attack, fins extending backwards from just behind his ears as he initialized a partial armor transfer, and his voice was practically a growl as his gaze focused on the Judge, the tips of his twin tails sparking. "_Enough_," he said, and a bolt of electricity danced between the small resonant transformers before firing off towards Flizard.

"I think not," and the spark of lightning arced into the crests of Schilt's helmet, the unit now obviously more than displeased with the situation and his fellow Judges.

Blues' battle protocols were active, all but screaming at him and he shifted, testing the bindings again.

No, these weren't ones he could reasonably force open. They'd truly been made with mechanical life in mind. With the Judges divided as they were, he could trust that he'd be (somewhat) shielded from (most) attacks, though he was immensely uncomfortable with the idea of leaving his personal safety in anyone's hands, let alone a handful of Reploids he'd never met, whose battle prowess he was only _just now_ learning of.

It was a bitter thing to admit that Wily had done a few good things by him: he was programmed to observe and build data sets about units in combat so should the day come that he'd have to battle them, he'd know how they fought from the get go. Even now, he was doing just that nearly subconsciously.

At least this way, he'd have an easier time of dodging attacks as time went on.

It had taken a moment for the shock to wear off before Kelverian got back to his feet, but the lumbering Judge did finally push himself up from where he'd fallen after Flizard's attack, fully intending to pin the hotheaded unit until someone could knock some sense into his processor. As he took his first step forward, however, there was a faint trembling that passed through the chamber floor, Kelverian's brow furrowing in confusion.

Another tremor shook the Council Chamber, with a soft rumble like thunder in the distance. There was silence for a few seconds before a third tremor shook the floor, followed by a crashing sound, this time much louder, much nearer. The room trembled then, the back wall opposing the dais heaving and shaking before giving way, the mortar crumbling away, the steel beams supporting the wall blown apart from the force of the blast that'd broken through.

It kicked up a cloud of dust and from the miasma, mechaniloids rushed in, in forms not made in Neo Arcadia. Fan Fiends and Lightning Lords charged in, their optics sweeping the room, not lingering or focusing on anyone or anything in particular, actively scanning the room and relaying the data back to their Master.

Their weapons were drawn and they quickly moved to take up position between Blues and the other occupants in the room, guarding the Robot Master from any further aggression. Several small, cheeping bird mechaniloids fluttered in, moving to sit in the high rafters of the room, their round eyes blinking down at the units below.

Once his mechaniloids had assembled and essentially taken the room hostage, a new unit stepped through the newly forged doorway, ducking slightly to fit through. He was broad and tall, far taller than any of the Robot Masters that'd appeared before, and his gaze focused on Blues as he stepped in and initiated a scan.

He wasn't at all surprised when much of the scan was rebuffed in a show of irritation.

Air didn't pay the Council members any mind whatsoever. His gaze moved slowly over Blues, noting the bindings around his wrists. A slow blink, then, in a voice that had a slightly grainy, staticky quality to it, a metallic tinge that made it more than clear that sounding inorganic had been _quite_ intentional, he said, "Target secured. No. I don't know. He's standing. No. He looks like he's going to fall over." There was a pause, then, "…I don't think that's on the table. No. Just…yes. Immediately." He glanced back to the hole he'd come in through, "The room was sealed from network access. No. It'll be suboptimal unless—fine." Air's carmine gaze rested on one of the Lightning Lords for a moment before the unit turned and darted back out the door. But rather than taking off into the night sky, it stood there, acting as a wireless relay point to strengthen the connection.

Only then did Air turn his attention to the assembled Reploids, and he was almost disinterested as he looked them over. It looked like he'd interrupted some sort of internal squabble, not that it mattered now. He commanded them to, "Disengage your weapons and step away. We've secured this tower, your network, and your city. This game's over."

Each of the Judges had found themselves both staring at the last of these many unexpected arrivals and having their systems go on high alert because of a weapons lock, but it was Kelverian that stood down first. Though he had none of his weapons armed, the hulking Judge lowered himself to his knees, placing both hands behind his head.

One by one, the remaining Judges followed suit, save for Flizard.

"I will not bow down to any threat to this city," he growled, lines of energy dancing over his arms. Even with the way the unit was dripping with water and the distant sound of a storm coming through the hole in the wall, he was not willing to disarm and quietly give up as the rest of his colleagues had. The red eyes were more than enough to confirm that this unit was not one he could stand by and allow to take over Neo Arcadia.

"Confirm link," Air said suddenly, looking off and to the side for a moment before snapping his attention back to Flizard. "Consider this your second and final warning. Stand down, disarm your weapon, and surrender. If you do not comply, I will make it so you _do._" He was speaking very slowly, as though to a particularly slow newbuilt and he stepped forward, toward Blues, his left arm morphing into an augmented buster. He trained it on Flizard, though his subordinate units remained trained on the other occupants in the room.

"You don't scare me, Maverick," Flizard said, arms morphing into his primary weapon set.

'_Wait,_' X asked over the link, '_Blues is _where_?!_' Hovering outside of one of the larger buildings in the manufacturing district, X winced as his right leg started to break apart. He secured the link with his eldest brother, though only to the extent that he could feel that Blues was okay.

He certainly wasn't looking forward to get yelled at for not following orders, though he did believe he'd be perfectly justified in throwing the argument right back at the Lightbot. '_I'll be there shortly,_' and that was sent over all nine active links before he moved back into Cyberspace.

It would take only a moment to make it to the chamber where Blues was being held.

Blues hadn't looked up when Air burst into the room and secured it in seconds, didn't look up when the subordinate robots surrounded him protectively, and didn't look up when one of the Judges insisted on challenging Air. At X's message, though, Blues did look up. He sought out Copy X's gaze and when the two units met eyes, a slow, cocky smirk crept its way along Blues' lips.

All eight Judges looked to the burst of light that had suddenly appeared a bit behind Blues, near the doorway that led into the chamber, and all of them were overtaken by shock and confusion as X stepped through the portal, a halo of multi-colored light dancing over his helmet, his form ethereal, looking like a Cyber Elf were the little ones able to grow as big as a standard Reploid.

"Hello, Copy X," the android greeted darkly.

Copy X, however, was shaking, barely keeping his feet. "You…you can't be…you're dead! Your body served as Dark Elf's final seal! You died in the sealing process!"

"Perhaps I did," X said, shrugging. "That does not change what's been done or correct the mistakes you've made since then."

"You have no right to judge me," Copy X shot back. "Not when it was your own impetuousness that mandated my construction and my rulership over Neo Arcadia."

"And this is what you've made of my city in those four short years," X said. "My children marked for death, my Judges at each other's throats," though Flizard and Inarabitta honestly was normal for the Council, "my brother, my _direct progenitor_, scrapped for parts as if his life was not worth the effort, my eldest brother brought before you on charges you've no doubt trumped up or fabricated for whatever game you're trying to play," and X grunted audibly as he lost some of the cohesion beneath his knees. "And that says nothing for whatever it was you unleashed upon my body in Sanctum Yggdrasil."

The fear and panic was evident in the way Copy X was holding himself. "You…?"

"What?" Kelverian said, looking to the phantasmal version of the city's ruler. "What do you mean?"

"What I mean," X said, gaze locked on the copy as his halo started to pulse with a deep blue light, "is that this unit had something to do with the destruction of my body and the loss of Dark Elf."

"More lies!" Inarabitta snapped at Copy X. "Telesphoros said that he could cure her, said that he would purify her of the taint!" To find out that all of this, all they'd done, had been part of so great a lie, and none of them had _known_ until the information was all but thrown at them? The guilt bit deeply.

Mantisk shook his head—he knew what was bothering the leporine Judge. "So many lives in four short years," he said softly, hanging his head.

"Thousands of lives that my Resistance has remembered," X said. "Thousands whose names will be inscribed into a memorial upon the walls of Sanctum Yggdrasil. Lives have been shattered, families ripped apart because of ideologies that were not mine, but we will rebuild." He glared at Copy X. "It's time you stopped this game," and he took a single step forward. "It is time to relinquish the city and the title you have taken unjustly from me."

"What makes you think you deserve this city any longer?" Copy X said, moving around the dais to approach the Cyber Elf. "It was only by chance, sheer dumb luck, that I found out what had happened to you. A simple bout of newbuilt curiosity and I discovered why I was hailed as a hero, a legend, something to much more than the child I was then. But no, I will not return the city to you. She needs a guiding hand and someone strong enough to protect her. To hand control back to you is to doom her and all she protects."

"And you think that the loss of Dark Elf is _protecting_ this city?" X asked. "How skewed is your perception of the world that you can idly ignore that she's been taken, stolen again? Are you so naïve as to not have read about the Elf Wars? Copy X, you must know what she's capable of!"

"Regardless of what she's capable of," the duplicate said with a dismissive gesture, "and the loss of three of the Guardians, I am doing what I can to save this city. I may not have your wisdom, your experiences, your memories, but I am not stupid. Four years old, still a child, younger even than the Judges, yes, but I can _learn_. I have learned."

X scoffed. "You hold yourself in such regard when you sentenced my family to death? How does that make sense?"

"We need to push forward. We need to defend this city, do what we can to neutralize the threats to our people. Why dwell on the past when it is something that cannot be changed?"

"The past cannot be changed, but that does not mean it is useless data that should be ignored," X protested.

"I will not have you so needlessly lecture me," the copy retorted. "You had your chance. You may have built the city, but when Dark Elf claimed your body, what did you have done? What plans were there to keep Neo Arcadia functioning?" A derisive snort. "You had a newbuilt thrust into a position of control he was not prepared for."

"That was not a judgment call made by me," X shot back. "Whatever was told to you of your creation and the reasons why, all I did was order the team that created Dark Elf's seal to absolute silence. Even my children were not allowed to know what was going on in Sanctum Yggdrasil. The scientist that built you, or rather, that had been assigned to build you—by a division of the city government that never existed, no less—lost you before she was able to complete you."

"I have no idea what you're talking about. My builder was male."

X's form shimmered a bit as worry pulsed through him at that admission. "You were made to not remember her, then. She's led the Resistance at my side because she feels guilty for losing you before she could finish you. She blames herself for your fate and this city's current state because whoever you know as your builder was the man that _stole_ you, incomplete, from her lab."

Copy X's face fell a bit at that revelation, then twisted into a mask of rage. "You lie to make me question my place, just like your brother before you, to give me reason to doubt myself and hand control of the city back to you."

"I'm only trying to help," X said, arms held open in an effort to show that he was sincere, that he came with offers of peace and assistance, not war.

"You're a useless relic of the past, X," Copy sneered. "This city and her citizens are mine to protect. You are not needed in this world any longer."

"And you are a puppet that exists only to be used," X shot back, a note of anger in his voice. "Without even knowing it, without a voice to protest, you sold your soul for power you did not deserve. I cannot give back to you the innocence you were never allowed to have, give you back the years you lost, but you can return to me what is rightfully mine, stand down and let me save my city before ruin befalls us all."

"I will give you nothing! This city is mine, _mine alone_, and I will remain her ruler because I have the power and the right to control her and all within the sanctuary of the Eden Dome!"Copy X stepped back, glowing faintly as he initialized the transformation into his Ultimate Armor. "I will not bow down and be told that I am wrong, that I must step aside, that I am not fit for command, simply because you cannot handle the guilt that you _abandoned_ the city when she most needed you!"

X's entire body was wreathed in cerulean light at the copy's exclamation, even his eyes solid orbs of blue, and his voice echoed a bit when he spoke. "You take on the aspect of an angel," he growled, "but you are anything but. And you have no power. Not over this city. Not over my Judges. Not over my family or my friends. Not over my citizens." He frowned deeply, letting his legs break apart and fade almost completely out of existence as he engaged his Hacker Override. "_And you will never have power over me!_"

Copy X had managed to get his buster halfway up before his body stopped responding to his commands, and his eyes locked with the blazing orbs of the city's true ruler, hatred seething in the carmine eyes.

At the same instant, there were multiple staticky, high pitched sounds, and four colorful beams of light shot into the room. Four new units manifested from the lights and the second the teleport completed, Rock bounded over to Blues, almost tackling the older unit in a deathgrip hug, initiating a plethora of scans, and pushing against Blues' usual reluctance to let anyone read too deeply.

Rock was upset enough that after a moment, the older unit did relent.

Quick and Metal targeted the Council as hostiles, the same as Air, and they moved to stand guard and ensure that no one tried anything. The message was clear by their gazes: they were done playing.

Ice was much calmer and he trotted over to Blues, reaching out with one hand and pressing his palm against the unit's forehead, as though checking for a fever. Well, he kind of _was_. Blues was still overheated: this entire interrogation had been incredibly stressful despite how calm he outwardly appeared. The temperature in the room dropped about five degrees in as many seconds, the cold concentrated around Ice.

* * *

><p>Zero and Phantom stopped almost simultaneously, Harpuia and Fefnir stopping just a bit ahead of them. "Lieutenant Commander," Phantom asked, "do you hear that?"<p>

"Yeah," Zero said, looking skyward.

"Hear—" Harpuia started to ask, only to cut himself off as he registered the sound as well. "That sounds like a drop ship."

"Except even our smallest ships don't sound like that," Phantom said. The sound was very close to that made by their transport ships, though not nearly as loud.

Zero continued looking through the sky, systems quickly pinpointing the location of the sound, and his eyes widened in surprise. "They brought _Air_?" he asked suddenly.

"Brought what?" Fefnir said, looking to the android.

"Not what, Fefnir, who," Zero corrected, waving to the Air Tikki as it cleared a nearby building. "Air is one of my eldest brothers," he said, a bit of a scowl on his face as he took in the appearance of the robot. "You'd think he'd have done something to make them look less imposing," and sighed as he clambered onto the mechaniloid once it landed. "Harpuia, you'll be okay following?"

"Affirmative, Lieutenant Commander. Fefnir damaged the thrusters on my Phenomenon, not my base pair," and he took to the air in confirmation of his statement, though he had to take a moment to just _stare_ at the thing that had come to pick them up. If the size wasn't intimidating enough, the mobile platform had _eyes_. Harpuia was pretty sure they moved to keep up with the units, too. _Creepy_.

Phantom moved to board the mechaniloid, vaulting on top with little effort, then looked to Fefnir. "Need a hand?" he asked.

Fefnir jogged up to the side of the mechaniloid, leisurely hopping up and using the large hatch to step up to the top edge and grab on. Hefting himself over the edge, he walked to the middle of the platform and looked at Phantom with a mischievous grin. "Just call me the Amazing Flying Fefnir."

"You keep your unwieldy tank ass on the ground," Harpuia called out, darting just over Fefnir's head as the Tikki took to the air.

"What," he shot back, "tanks can't fly? Just _look_ at this thing!" and he waved in the general direction of the Air Tikki. "Take a good look! Think of how heavy it must be. It's flying. And it's carrying us!"

"Zip it, you two," Zero said, leaning down and tapping the robot gently. "We're good to go."

Once the three units were settled and ready to move, the Tikki took off for Neo Arcadia Tower, Harpuia trailing a bit behind.

* * *

><p>"I promise, it won't fall," Elec repeated for the third time. He had both of Levi's hands in his and was coaxing her aboard the Tikki, the waterborne unit looking absolutely terrified of the concept of riding on what was essentially a flying <em>platform.<em> There was no grip, no seat, no _nothing._ And Elec was treating this as though this was normal, safe transport?

She finally stepped onto it, shakily, but she immediately sank down to sit on it, her vicelike grip on Elec never faltering as she pulled him down to sit next to her for her to cling to.

Her grip only tightened as the Tikki began its ascent.

Leviathan was already deeply regretting boarding this thing.

* * *

><p>X wasn't easing up on the hack, forcibly overriding system after system of Copy X's, and had just managed to reverse the armor change.<p>

"How are you…?" Copy X managed before X asserted control over _that _systemtoo.

"Does it matter?" X said. "What matters is that by the time I'm done with you, you won't be able to bring further harm to my city." He grit his teeth as more of his form broke into loose bits of data, and he willed his energy to holding his form, his body growing fainter. "If the price I have to pay for the safety of Neo Arcadia is my life, then so be it."

"X, no!" Rock wheeled around, not even noticing that he now had coolant stains on his clothing. He was still gripping Blues by one sleeve, tightly, though the force of the littler unit's movements didn't budge him. "I-I know you're angry, but don't…" Rock trailed off for a moment, seeming to steel himself. "He's not worth your life. No one...Doctor Light worked really hard on you, and he agonized over what the future may hold. He was so torn up that he wouldn't be able to be there when you were activated, that…that all he could do was try to prepare you for every eventuality he could conceive. We found him in your lab in the morning over and over again, never having gone to sleep the night before, because he wanted you to be able to not only live, not only survive, but to _thrive._ He wouldn't want you to kill yourself, especially not over someone like Copy X. And neither do I. I don't want you to go. I want you to stay." Rock's voice was tremulous, and the only thing that was concealing the fact that there were tears running down his cheeks was that he was already soaked through.

"I…" and X's voice fell a little, though the hack was holding steady. "I'm sorry," he said, "but this is my life to live, my time to spend as I see fit," and his focus on the unit tightened. "I can't allow someone like him to survive, not when he's the tool for an unknown puppet master that seeks to end all the good I've tried to do here." His mental grip tightened as he forced Copy X to kneel before him.

"X," Rock's voice was quiet this time, quiet and shaky. He had to turn his vocals off to keep the sob from finding its way out.

X sighed heavily, going a little more transparent as he continued to hold Copy X in place, putting everything into shutting down systems and finding some way to take the unit permanently offline. As his left arm began to break apart, X frowned, probing the Reploid's systems. Something was different about this unit. Where he always had difficulty taking control of any unit he hacked—though his experience with the program was reasonably limited—there was always a lapse between his mental command and the unit's response. With Copy X? The orders were followed immediately and fluidly, as if working through a direct connection.

Hazarding a look at the coding, at the core drives and the systems that were now under his control, X almost laughed in his surprise. "Maybe destroying you would be a waste," he said, floating towards the prone form. "It seems there _is_ another purpose you can serve, another role you can fulfill." X was silent for a moment as he considered the replicate unit. "Consider this your atonement for all the havoc you have brought upon my city and her people."

He moved closer still to Copy X, a little sick at heart for what he was about to attempt. Looking to Rock, worry and discomfort evident in his gaze just as the defense program's visor snapped down and covered his eyes. "Wish me luck."

Pressing his remaining hand to the back of Copy X's neck, X let out an uneven breath…

…and uploaded to the copy's processor.

Okay, well, _that _wasn't something any of the units in the room were expecting. Blues stared at Copy X's still form for several moments. Something occurred to him then and his eyes widened in comprehension. It wasn't long for his hypothesis to hit the Robot Masters' network, and Quick and Metal both straightened at the news. Air continued gazing impassively forward, Ice closed his eyes, and Rock turned back to Blues. He bowed his head, the tears still falling.

Because Copy X's life was still a _life._


	45. Chain of Command

_A shift in power, an upsetting memory brought to the fore, and a few bittersweet reunions are just the start of the Resistance's reclamation of Neo Arcadia. Once X has his fill of hugs and Zero's had a chance to formally meet a few more members of his family, there's a lot of work that needs to be done._

* * *

><p>Even with the defense program active and his shield up—and the practice session he'd had with Blues—X was still thankful for his own anti-hack programs still being accessible as he dove into Copy X's mind. Copy X's system saw his presence as an invasion and responded in kind, lancing out against him in an effort to destroy his data. Shields repelled the effort as X pushed back with his own anti-hack, his data feed slowing up after a few moments as his anti-hack almost completely destroyed Copy X's security measures.<p>

Shutting down the offensive half of his systems, X reached deeper, let himself look over the coding once more, this time in depth, and he could have almost broken down in tears of relief when he saw that this was _his_ coding. His core programming, his base drives, all of it was there.

But hadn't Ciel said as much? She'd been working on his logic and judgment programs when he'd been stolen, so everything else would have been his…wherever she'd gotten the data from.

Turning his attention to the programming that Ciel hadn't installed, X looked over it, frowning a bit at the program, analyzing the data. Whatever this had been meant as, it certainly wasn't anything as comprehensive or detailed as X's own.

And the programming language…it wasn't the same as Light's, was nowhere near as complex.

What of the programming was Light's, though, he could read now, courtesy of Blues. He knew the encryptions, had full logs of his translated data, and in that had found security protocols that had never been triggered during the Maverick Wars. Protocols he'd be making use of now.

He looked over the coding one last time, all of Copy X's files, and his attention turned to the unit's memory drive. Geopbytes of empty space were still there, four years taking almost none of the available space, and he frowned. Save for the few files that had been installed after his abduction, his processor had been mapped out truly identical to X's own.

This child, had he been built by Ciel from start to finish, would have been a carbon copy.

Hesitantly, he selected the entirety of Copy X's memory files, looked at the meager history of the child that had tried to fill his boots…

…and set the memory files to download to his own systems, running a full-spectrum scan just to ensure he was getting nothing _more_ than the copy's memories. His defenses were still active, though far less aggressive, simply ensuring that nothing would be getting through to attack X directly, and the Cyber Elf was almost relaxed as he watched the progress bar slowly creep toward completion, the Reploid's memory files being downloaded into a new subfolder in his own memory mainframe, security measures locking the files until X could link up with Blues or Rock and have them run a comprehensive scan on the data.

Better safe than sorry, after all. Even if being safe bordered on being paranoid.

Once the download was completed, the elf's attention suddenly changed focus, his own energy and his defense program linking into the system security control hub, and there was no hesitation in him as he triggered a self-defense program that, had it ever been set off, would have wiped X's processor completely clean. As it was, the protocol would only affect the installed information, though he did make sure to bring his own defenses fully online just as a precaution.

Copy X shook a bit, arms barely holding himself above the floor, at the feeling of the original destroying his programs, his drives…destroying_ him_. After all he'd done, all that he had wrought upon the city and upon X's name, all that he hated and detested about himself because he had no idea how to be someone he wasn't, was this a just ending? Was it time to reap the fruits of his work?

A single tear fell just before he collapsed to the ground, those haunted crimson optics going offline.

The failsafe to this particular protocol was, of course, his baseline personality and ethical analysis data being installed on a backup section of his processor that would have, in the event of a systems corruption, reinstalled once his processor had completed the purge. Inaccessible during system operations, X would have to wait until the copy's body went offline to link into there and delete that data as well. The copy's baseline data had likely been created the moment he'd been activated and taken command of the city.

X's baseline had been saved the moment Cain had unsealed his pod those many, many years ago.

The Robot Masters were quiet. They were watching. They were waiting. Blues' gaze remained fixated on Copy X's prone form, though his eyes were distant, as though he was remembering something far-off.

Rock couldn't look. He just couldn't. There were memories replaying in his mind's eye, the same as they had to be for some of the other units in this room. It was correct that the Copy had to be removed from his position of power. It was correct that the Copy was an unfit Master and needed to be toppled. And it was correct that he was completely unapologetic for everything he'd done. Even if they did show him mercy now, there'd be _no reason_ for him to change his attitude. Rock knew that it'd be far more harmful to let the Copy live, but at the same time…

It was still a life. All this fighting, all this dying, and he knew this wasn't even the end of it. He knew that this was only one part of the fight, that there'd be more before they could finally rest.

He'd heard once that heroes only truly rested when they were in their graves. _But,_ Rock wondered, _what happens to the heroes that never die?_

A soft moan was the first sign anyone got as the form on the floor near Blues came back online. Pushing himself up a little, one hand drifted to his eyes, shielding the optics, and he held still, as if getting his bearings.

Rock was the first to query status from X, tentatively, his shields still up and tight just in case something had gone wrong, just in case the Copy was the unit that was still commanding the body.

The reaction was immediate, defense system coming online and throwing link requests out to the nine units he'd been connected to before. His first link, and the one he fortified the most, was the one with Rock, and he passed relief and comfort across that tenuous connection.

Finally looking up, his emerald eyes focused on the handcuffed and bloodied brother, and his brows furrowed. "Blues…is any of that even _yours_?" He asked, one hand moving over the floor as he tried to push himself up into a sitting position, leaning against the raised platform and the front of the Council table.

Blues' gaze never left X's, and blue met green as the android addressed him. The unit glanced down at himself one more time before responding, "Reploids are messy."

"Yeah," X said with a soft smile as he rested against the table, reaching up—and to be able to _feel _again!-and removing his helmet, letting the metallic armor roll across the floor and away from him. "We do tend to be a bit on the messy side. Then again, most times we're fighting, we don't get as…directly involved as Robot Masters." Once he'd gotten comfortable, he sent a full status update to all four of his brothers and motioned to Rock to come over.

He wanted a hug. Hell, at this point, he needed one.

He looked to the injured Zan'ei lieutenant nearby and the three units that looked like members of Phantom's team, though he didn't recognize the units at all. '_Blues, Magnion and the units near the door need medical attention. I doubt you're allowing anyone to use the lifts, but can they at least be moved to a different room?_' They could summon a medical team as soon as things were a bit more settled.

Blues nodded from where he was still settled on the floor, tilting his head slightly to relay the request to Air. He could have ordered Air's units to allow the Reploids out of the room, but that'd just have been rude. '_The robots will not impede their move to a holding room._'

X looked to the nearest of the Zan'ei. "You," he said, waving a hand toward Phoenix. "You and your group take Lieutenant Magnion and your squadmates to another room, make them comfortable. We'll have a medical officer come up as soon as we can.

Phoenix looked to X for a moment, then helped the Zan'ei by folding his wings down and wrapping his arms around the shoulders of the two units that had moved to carry him, trying to ease their burden just a little. Those that had been pinned to the wall in the wake of Inarabitta's attack were still able to walk, though the third unharmed Zan'ei did take a minute breaking the last of the ice away from their damaged limbs.

Rock scooted back from Blues, then got to his feet. He was still soaked through, but he wasn't damaged at all. He'd managed to (mostly) calm down, and there was warm relief radiating off his signal on the network, on the Harmony, as he sank down next to X and hugged the android properly for the first time.

X held on tightly to the little unit, feeling the cold dampness of Rock's clothes against his face and hands, feeling the weight of his older brother against him, knowing that Rock wouldn't be falling through him this time. "I'm sorry," he whispered, "to have worried you so."

"I'm glad you're not hurt," Rock managed to respond. He was having trouble keeping his emotions in check, and he was trembling both with cold and unshed tears. Grief, joy, elation, despair, it all felt the same to him in that moment. He shuddered and rested his forehead against X's shoulder, not even considering that he was likely getting him wet, too.

It was such a _relief_.

X pushed Rock back just a little, just enough so that he could look his brother in the eyes, and he ran the fingers of one hand through the unit's damp locks. "Part of me is glad I wasn't out in that maelstrom," he said with a soft smile. "But I can't just sit on my rear all day," and he asked Rock over link if he'd help him up, promising all the hugs he wanted later, once this was under control.

Rock smiled and stood, offering his hands to X. He sent reassurance to X via link: it was raining hard but really, it wasn't _that_ bad. Just wet, cold, and windy.

Rock did take X's promise of hugs to heart, though, and there was this look on the elder Lightbot's face: he'd hold X to it. And collect interest.

X teetered a minute, one hand moving back to the table behind him until he stabilized. Moving around the room for a moment, a soft '_Don't worry_' sent across the links, X quickly recalibrated his vertical baseline, doing a quick check of his motor controls, before turning to the large unit that had provided him with Blues' location.

He'd thought being on the floor had something to do with the unit's imposing figure, that his anger at the copy had made him pay less attention to the unit than he should have, but even standing at his full height, Air still towered over him. And X could see _exactly_ what Blues had meant about some of the units looking more like large mechaniloids, that fact only sinking in further now that X's systems weren't a wave of anger and disappointment. "Thank you," he said to Air.

Air nodded to X, though he hadn't commanded his units to lower their busters or reassess the threat level in the room. He was standing nearer to the center of the room, though his body was positioned so that neither the makeshift entryway he'd used nor the dais was behind him. "The others will arrive shortly." His Air Tikkis just reported in that they were closing in on their destination and outside, the units patrolling the halls and tower had to reposition themselves to allow the Tikkis through.

X didn't flinch, didn't physically respond to the way Air sounded, but there was a burst of surprise across the link from him, and X's eyes widened a bit when he realized he'd accidentally _sent_ that. "My…my apologies," he said, looking to Air a bit worriedly. "I did not mean to offend."

Zero was waiting on the edge of the Tikki as it neared the gaping hole in the side of Neo Arcadia Tower, not even waiting for the airborne unit before vaulting off, his boosters providing just enough thrust for him to land inside the facility, and he moved into the room, eyes darting over the assembled units.

Fefnir followed closely behind, both Busters already charging, grateful to have an opportunity to finally lay these past four years to rest. Rage twisted his features as his murderous gaze fell upon the unit standing near Air Man. "Alright, you homicidal fake, prepare to meet your—"

It didn't surprise Zero in the least that Fefnir had followed this particular course of action, and he reached out, settling one hand over the nearer of the Guardian's two Busters, shaking his head before turning to look at the blue-armored unit near his brother. "X?"

The brunet nodded, a soft smile on his face as he looked to his son. "Yeah."

Rock was regarding Fefnir with round eyes, and while he'd tensed for those moments the unit had his weapons armed, he could see that Fefnir was, at least, not going to shoot blindly in X's general direction.

The motion had caught Air's attention too, and Fefnir was added to the running log of probable threats in the room, though he was nowhere near the top of the list.

The shock of seeing his father in a material body very nearly caused Fefnir to accidentally discharge his Busters, but he quickly dissipated the charge instead. Dismissing his armaments, his shock magnified as he finally took note of the lumbering unit towering over them, his bulky frame made all the more imposing by the massive propeller blades in his chest and the blood-red eyes that had, for a moment, been tracking him. He recovered enough to wipe the bewilderment from his face before addressing him. "I take it you're Air?"

"He is," Zero said. "I can probably go ahead and make introductions after we get everything in the city settled down," and his gaze shifted back to X then. "_You_. For all the suicidal insanity we subjected ourselves to during the Maverick and Elf Wars, this stunt certainly takes the whole damn cake and a couple tubs of ice cream. What the hell did you _think_ you were doing?"

"Trying to get a physical body back so I wasn't dealing with the whole elf form energy expenditure issue."

"And the whole situation with Fefnir before you made the jump here? There's no way you restored enough to stabilize," and the only thing that kept Zero from continuing with his tirade was the sound of Harpuia and Phantom moving into the building.

It took Harpuia a moment to move into the chamber, having stopped just inside the hole in the Tower, his gaze locked on the hulking blue figure that dominated most of the room. He couldn't help the slight smirk at the way Fefnir was looking, fairly certain that even without having heard the exchange, the younger AXR had done _something_ to stick his foot in his mouth. When he caught sight of X and the familiar emerald eyes, his relief was almost palpable.

It took even less time for Phantom to come to the same conclusion as his siblings, and there was no holding back the ninja as he bolted for his father, embracing the android warmly.

"And this makes it all worth it, your disapproval notwithstanding," and he returned Phantom's hug just as enthusiastically.

"At least you've _noted_ my disapproval." A cocky smirk. "Nice little turn to the tables, though, hm?"

X rolled his eyes, frowning a half-second later. "Wait…since I was usually the one chiding you during the Wars?" A moment of quiet as Phantom let go of him. "You restored another memory file?"

A look of confusion crossed Zero's face for a moment before he pieced together what X had meant, and then laughed, letting his eyes drift closed as he hunted down the optics coding. When he looked to X again a few seconds later, his eyes were a familiar shade of deep blue. "Memory restoration's at a hundred percent, so I'm back in the green on all systems. You?"

"I've got a couple things I need to go over with Rock or Blues later, but nothing pressing," and X looked to his other two sons at that. "Get over here, both of you."

Fefnir hesitated a moment, then strode forward and wrapped his father in a warm embrace, decidedly not thinking about what he had cost for his father to gain a body again. For now, he simply wanted to be happy for his father.

The nightmare was finally over.

Considering the hell that both of them had been through, especially in the last few weeks, Harpuia didn't bother waiting for Fefnir to pull away, embracing both brother and father for a quick moment, far more reserved than his siblings, even though he was just as happy, just as relieved.

There was a loud clattering sound as Shadow finally picked the lock on Blues' handcuffs, the elder unit tossing them aside once both cuffs were loose. The metal bindings bounced and skidded across the floor and toward the dais. Slowly, he got to his feet, a bit unsteady, but he refused Shadow's offer of a steadying hand: he was _fine_.

He couldn't peel the saturated gloves from his hands quickly enough and after a moment, both pieces of clothing had been allowed to drop to the floor.

Metal diplomatically ignored the Guardians and strode forward to make introductions, though honestly, he and Zero had met before even if the younger unit didn't recall it. "I'm glad you've recovered yourself." He'd heard of Zero's memory loss: they'd been fully briefed this time around, had the full story so they could properly plan the contingency for the siege. He looked to X then and nodded. "I am DWN-009, Metal Man."

It took a moment for X to extricate himself from Fefnir's hug, the unit slightly resistant, before both he and Zero turned to face Metal, decades of military decorum evident in their movements as they snapped to attention and saluted the elder Wilybot. The android's gaze did move for a moment, however, toward the other new unit in the room, wondering if the red and gold of Zero's original armor was part of a trend in the family line.

"Quick," Zero said, moving to his brother, realizing as he got closer that his body switch had made the Wilybot's already imposing figure a bit more so for him, and offered a hand. "X mentioned to me earlier that there were two others from our line," and his expression was one of mild confusion, since only four of the six were present in the room.

A look of slight exasperation crossed Quick's face at Zero's question, though he did take the offered hand. "There are. Enker secured the tower's base and blocked the military units already dispatched from reentering. He's holding a perimeter with the support of more of Air's units. Forte's the fifth. I instructed him to support Enker until we got things straightened out up here." And Quick glanced to Blues for a moment before resting his gaze back on Zero.

"So you've got Enker babysitting Forte until we've got things under control," Zero said, shaking his head. He turned back to Metal, bowing his head toward the unit. "Is there anywhere my unit and I can be of use?"

Metal considered for a moment or two, then said, "Stay here for the time being. We need to finish sorting all of this out." Well, honestly, X did since they weren't actually maintaining custody of the city, but until then, they wouldn't be withdrawing, either.

It took a minute or so longer for Leviathan and Elec to arrive because of the girl's fear of flight. Elec had to request the Tikki to move a bit slower before this Reploid had a full-on panic attack and it made the Robot Master sincerely wish she had a personal teleporter. It'd have been so much easier for the both of them to go, but his own didn't have the capability to teleport others, though he knew Blues knew how to crack it to bring passengers.

That was how he'd gotten Kalinka Cossack out of Skull Fortress: detrimental as teleportation could be to a human mind, it was damage over time and honestly, that one teleport was far less damaging than likely being shot by an angry Robot Master.

The Tikki finally leveled out, though, and Elec ended up having to carry her back onto solid ground. He set her down in the hall so she could walk in on her own strength, though she did need a moment or two to orient herself.

She was utterly composed when she finally did stride into the room, her gait only faltering for a moment when she caught sight of Air.

She was the one that'd inherited their father's composure, after all.

When Fefnir caught sight of his sister rounding the imposing Wilybot, his core nearly froze, relief apparent in his voice as he called out to her. "Levi!" and he strode swiftly forward, enveloping her in a tight embrace as he softly said to her, "I'm so glad you're okay." He broke his hold on her a moment later, his hands rising to grab at either side of her head, and there was a soft metallic thud as he leaned down and their helmets knocked together, and he leveled a fierce gaze at her. "But for the love of whatever might be left of my sanity, the next time I tell you to leave your crazy Maverick brother alone and wait for backup, you _leave_ your crazy Maverick brother _alone_ and _wait for backup_." His jaw clenched as a wave of nearly overwhelming guilt hit him then, the wound he'd received from his mind's twisted mockery of his sister still fresh, still stinging, and he wrapped her in his arms once more before managing a soft, tremulous, "I'm sorry I let you go."

Leviathan was still quite shaky from the ride on the Tikki and even though her sensors were still dialed up and agitated, she was nearly limp in Fefnir's arms, as though it was all she could do to keep standing. Her gaze flickered around the room from over Fefnir's shoulder in the moments before he knocked helmets with her, and her cyan gaze was centered on him as he spoke. "What did I tell you about not beating yourself up over things, particularly _their_ pranks, Fefnir?" And the weak smile she offered was no small comfort. "I think that you and I both have leverage from here on out, though, don't you?"

Fefnir gently released her and cast a withering glare in Phantom's direction. "Yeah. Leverage. We'll go with that."

The ninja all but shrank behind Harpuia at the look he received. There was only one other time in his _life_ he'd been looked at like that, and that glare had come in the half-second before his systems had dropped into emergency shutdown subroutines and he'd blacked out.

X took the momentary silence from his children to walk over to where Fefnir and Leviathan were, settling his hand on Fefnir's head for a moment, the motion both calming and comforting, before he turned to his only daughter and pulled her into a tight embrace.

Leviathan sighed and clunked the front of her helmet against X's shoulder, the two nearly even in height now that he had a body once more.

It wasn't his original. She'd known that the moment she walked through. That, however, would be an emotional hurdle to jump _after_ everything had settled down. Instead, she asked in a quiet voice, "Are your systems nominal, Father?"

"I'm still running scans just to make sure everything installed properly," he assured, "but so far, so good."

She smiled at that, then turned her head to look to Phantom, then Harpuia before turning to look back to X before taking a step back, her posture straight even if she wasn't at attention. "You should take time to rest, Father. We can bring the city to order," and give him a _real_ chance to relax.

"Not right now. For the past four years, I've done nothing _but_ rest. Now that we're back in control of the city, I need to step up where the city wouldn't let me and start putting things back to right." He turned to look at his kids once more before facing his eldest brother. "Blues, as of right now, is there anywhere that the Zeroth can be of use?"

Blues had, up to that point, been reestablishing connection to the city's networks and verifying that all the orders he issued prior to his capture were still in place. He'd looked a bit distracted standing on the floor, but his gaze did focus when X addressed him. "By the reports, the streets are quiet, though the populace should be addressed," and soon, given the uncertainty in the air. "I see no need for further military action on the streets, provided no unrest breaks out." So no, X pretty much had a carte blanche as to where he could send the four generals.

Fefnir tapped X gently on the shoulder and nonchalantly thumbed in the direction of the captured Judges. "Speaking of addressing issues…um, what are we really going to do with them? I mean, they were as duped as we were."

"We give them the same chance you four had," and X turned to the Judges then. "After we manage to settle this city down," and start scouring the Eden Dome and surrounding lands for whatever party proved responsible for the destruction of his original body, "any of you that wish to step down from your position as Judges will be allowed to do so. Until then, Fefnir, I want you to escort the Judges to their quarters and have them remain there until I say otherwise." His gaze shifted to Air at that. "With your permission, I'd like to have a few of your subordinate units posted as guards."

Air closed his eyes, and four of the Lightning Lords shifted and moved toward the door, their body language relaxed as they awaited orders. "They'll follow the instruction you give them," the Second Number informed them, though he didn't add that every order would be relayed through him and reviewed.

Rock was regarding Fefnir with round eyes from around X's other side. Despite the few obstacles they'd had, this siege had by and far gone exceedingly well. They'd managed to capture the city with no casualties on their side and with minimal casualties to even the city's patrols.

Or as minimal as it could have been, given the circumstances.

He looked up to X then, that soft smile on his face, "We should go tell the city it's safe now."

A soft nod, and X looked to Fefnir. "Get the Judges to their chambers. Air's units will guard the hallways leading from their quarters until further notice. Once that's taken care of, meet up with Zero and your siblings, and if anything comes up between then and now, you'll be posted."

Fefnir snapped off a quick salute, although the nonchalant manner in which he said, "You got it, Dad," was a bit mismatched. He then rounded on the Judges and addressed them. "Okay, you guys, you can stop…um…'assuming the position'? Either way, on your feet, let's go."

The eight Judges were all a bit unsteady as they stood, their systems still registering the numerous target locks from the units that had come surging into the room in the wake of the hulking blue unit having made his own doorway into the chamber. As Fefnir began ushering them out of the room, Inarabitta stopped, chancing a look back to the leader of the city. "M-Master X, what is…what's to be done with us?"

There was no mistaking that tremor in the little Judge's voice, no way X could have missed the _fear_ in his eyes. "Whatever you may think of me in wake of the things you've seen, do not think me as callous as the unit that had been…acting in my stead," and it was clear in the contemptuous tone X used at the end of his sentence what he'd truly thought of Copy X's capabilities.

Deathtanz moved to his fellow Judge, settling a hand on the wide-eyed unit's shoulder. "Come, Childre," he said softly, and though the way he carried himself was as proud as ever, there was a lingering hurt in his eyes as he considered X and his children before moving out of the room with the rest of the Council.

"Harpuia, I want you and Phantom—"

"For all of the damn trouble it's caused," a voice called out from the hole in the wall, the sound of thrusters dim against the storm raging outside, "I certainly could have kept my ass back at base and not gotten dragged out into that hellstorm for the sake of a few pansy-ass Lightbots."

"Forte," Zero said, turning to face the Wilybot, "now is neither the place nor the time for any of your bullshit, so I'd suggest you check the attitude and follow the orders you're given."

"And you think I'm going to stand here and let Wily's girly-bot pet project tell me what to do like I'm supposed to respect you?" He eyed the unit for a moment once he'd moved around Air and gotten a good look at Zero. "Okay, there is some serious fuckery going on here. Mega Man's got no armor, Break looks like hell warmed over…or shit warmed over in hell, and for the rest of us to be registering you as who you're supposed to be, I'll be damned if Wily made you to look anything like _that_."

Zero snorted. "You know what, smart ass? Bring it."

Forte smirked, laughing a bit. "Oh, think that cocky ass maneuver's gonna make you look like less of a pushover?" He considered arming his buster, choosing instead to simply let his wings fold against his back. "Fuck this, I can take you on without my guns."

Zero held steady as Forte advanced on him, a smirk of his own given in return. As Forte swung on him, Zero ducked beneath the swing, driving his elbow into Forte's midsection before grabbing hold of both Forte's punching arm and his pelvic armor, almost effortlessly tossing the heavier unit to the floor. His saber was drawn, thumb over the activation switch, and the emitter cone was pressed against the robot's torso just beneath his obsidian armor. "We don't have _time_ for your childish _bullshit_," Zero said. "Now stand down, find out where you and your mutt are needed, and _get the fuck to work_."

"Both of you, knock it off," Blues moved several paces nearer the two units, his azure gaze grazing over Zero and lingering on Forte. "You're rambunctious tonight. You're with me." And it wasn't a request.

Zero was on his feet immediately. "Apologies, Commander."

Forte's eyes actually flickered to Zero for a half-second before turning to Blues, and despite his best efforts to keep the scowl in place, there was a flicker of apprehension in his gaze.

Blues waved one hand, dismissing Zero's apology. "I'd have dropped him, too." If anything, he approved of Zero's response to Forte's challenge, even if this was neither the time nor the place for such things. He beckoned to Forte with his bloodied hand then, indicating that the Wilybot should save some of his dignity and stand. "I am certain, however, that we can find _something_ to do to readjust your attitude, SWN-001. Until then," and Blues turned to X, "It'd be prudent to orient those Judges of yours, and make contact with the other units you seeded throughout the city. Once that is set, Elec will bring the others in via one of the Trans Servers."

X nodded. "I'll take care of the Judges once we get the military back to—" and he stopped mid-sentence as a link request came through over local wireless, X frowning for a moment before he verified the link with Fefnir. His frown deepened for a moment before he looked to Blues. "I need you to provide network access allowances for me and Fefnir and to unlock the main lift bank for this level."

The Robot Master blinked and a moment later, all administrative-level staff was granted network access, though X was the only one given actual admin rights. A moment after that, the lifts' locks were lifted, each humming softly to life in its shaft. "Granted," Blues finally answered with a short nod to the android.

"Zero?"

"Sir?" he asked X in response.

"Take the Zeroth to the residential district, get our officers up to speed on what happened, and make sure you get a full debriefing from all the teams you assigned. Leave Fefnir here for the time being, I want him monitoring the Judges. Run into any of the military units still out there before I'm able to broadcast stand-down orders, you do what you can to keep this from escalating."

The unit considered the room for a moment before turning to Phantom. "General, I'm assuming the other units in the room here are yours, based on design similarity. Get them down to Medical, have the staff start tending to them, rendezvous with Heather and the other two agents and meet us in the residential area. Air, if you don't mind sending a few of your units down with him, I'd like a guard posted at each room they're in just for security purposes." He looked to the elder two AXRs for a moment before adding, "Harpuia, Leviathan, you're with me for the time being. Zeroth, move out."

Some of the Fan Fiends moved this time, their gazes trailing curiously from Air and over to Phantom before falling in line, moving into standby as they awaited orders from the general, still on a very short leash even if they were currently being 'borrowed'.

Leviathan watched the mechaniloids move before stepping over to Zero, more mild curiosity in her gaze than anything else, and she saluted Zero crisply when she caught his eye. Once the mechaniloids had followed Phantom from the room, Leviathan and Harpuia fell in line behind Zero.

Round-eyed, Rock looked up to X. "What should I do?"

"For now, just stay with me. I'm going to need you to link up with me and help with the scans, but I'd like to at least get the city settled before nightfall." He considered the units in the room for a moment before realizing another detail he'd missed in the heyday that had been the last hour. "Blues, unlock the city Trans Servers for all registered Resistance personnel, please."

Forte had waited for Zero to move before he'd hazarded getting to his feet, disengaging from Gospel and holding still. The Eldest's threat was still dancing through his processors, and he was not looking forward to things finally getting settled down, his lupine partner sitting quietly beside him.

However embarrassing it was, he was used to get his ass kicked. This time, though, the punishment was proving far worse than what should be merited by his actions.

It wasn't like he'd actually _hit_ Rock this time.

Blues nodded to X, "They're unlocked. Would you like me to permit you to break the silence on the network?"

Ice's gaze was focused on Rock, a flicker of concern passing over the Lightbot's face before returning to that so carefully rehearsed 'neutral' expression so many Robot Masters donned. The Harmony was dancing as it always did, everyone's feelings a murmur of rising and falling experiences, but Rock was bothered. Ice had an idea, but he nudged Rock over that connection nevertheless, gentle encouragement to spill it at least over a private link if he didn't want to make a public display. Rock's initial resistance to that was a new thing, a thing that Ice rightly suspected was picked up from Blues, something taught by example, and a push was all it took to break through the unit's resolve.

All Ice could offer was a feeling of comforting reassurance at Rock's answer.

Air turned then and strode to the doorway he'd blasted into the room. He crossed the hall and stood at the gaping hole he'd blasted into the outer wall of the tower, his gaze trailing outward and downward, even as he was pelted with chilling rain. Mentally, he reached out to his units, to the ones still toiling out there in the sky, and issued an order. _Objective fulfilled. Cease current activity cycle and remain on standby. _He reached out to those that were on patrol or guarding, affirming that they were doing a good job, but not removing them from their current posts. Until everything was fully calmed, his units would guard the Tower.

As he did so, the rain began to ease, to taper off, and before long, the storm had calmed and the rain ceased. The cloud cover remained dense, that would take longer to dissipate, but the city was quiet, awash in fresh rain, awaiting its new beginning.

Wrapping an arm around Rock's shoulders in a quick hug, X looked to Blues. "Let's get up to the observation deck," he said, turning for the doorway and the lift beyond. "Anyone that wishes to follow may do so. This won't take long," and despite the faint notes of unfamiliarity in his signal over the link with his family, X was relieved, calmer than he'd been in a long time now that his life, his energy, wasn't dependent on what little he could hold as a Cyber Elf, but on the five tanks within his chest cavity. Leaning down, he grabbed his helmet, familiar armor sliding into place as he stepped from the room.

Blues glanced back to Forte once again before turning and following X and Rock. Ice and Elec followed next, though the Second Numbers didn't leave until Forte cleared the room. The robots that Air called in to take the room darted back outside, flying out to the sky either by their own power or on the Tikkis, leaving the Judges' chamber abandoned.

* * *

><p>"You've looked rather out of sorts since we left the Council Chamber," Zero noted. "Everything okay, Harpuia?"<p>

The Reploid shook his head after a moment. "Your brothers," and the Rekku General paused for a moment to figure out how he wanted to phrase this. "They aren't entirely what I expected."

"In terms of what?"

"Production design, I suppose. Sure, most of them look human, even if Quick and Metal are taller than most humanoid models I've encountered, but the one, Air, he's…"

"Honestly, that's not the worst in terms of non-humanoid design in my family. Even _your_ grandfather built a few 'bots that raised eyebrows." Zero shrugged. "Things were different in their era. Besides, I've seen the Pantheon units you have in the city and the mechaniloids back at the Resistance base. It's not like this city doesn't have a few units that are so obviously mechanical in nature it almost doesn't make sense."

Harpuia shrugged. "I don't think I can say too much when you've not met any of our lieutenants yet."

"Should I be worried?" Zero asked.

"Only if you're not used to Reploids taking on animal characteristics in terms of their base designs," Harpuia commented.

Leviathan was standing beside Harpuia on the lift, leaning against the wall as it steadily descended. She glanced to her elder brother for a moment before looking back to their unit commander. "I think we were startled because the units that are actually sapient, for Reploids, are generally organic in appearance. If not humanoid, then animalistic." Never wholly robotic. And that didn't even touch on how _imposing_ all three units were. They were Elec's height or taller, but more filled out, with broader shoulders and more mass. "Though, judging by their armor design, they seem to be designed for combat, or at least, more than our uncles were."

Zero nodded. "The DWNs are combat-oriented. The DLNs were more set up as industrial models. They weren't meant to fight like my family was." The blond closed his eyes, sighing as he leaned against the wall of the lift.

"Is that why Uncle Blues had them come, then?" Since they were combat models and, well, there _had_ been some things going wrong with the siege?

"That's likely, though any guesses I make regarding what happened with the DWN units would be pure speculation until someone corrects me on it." Zero was quiet for a moment. "I'd figure that Air was called in in part because of his weather manipulation. At least two units would have been able to benefit in combat situations while it was storming like it was. Metal and Quick, since they're two of the oldest, could be seen as a move to pull some of the senior members of the hierarchy here, but I'm starting to wonder if at least one of them came along to keep tabs on Forte."

"If a unit proves to be as much of a loose cannon as Forte, why even bring him along?" Harpuia asked. "Wouldn't it be beneficial to bring only those who can do their assigned jobs and won't start firing on their allies?"

"As true as that might be with a lot of military strategy, you have to realize that I was the Hunter's loose cannon for a majority of my seven decades of service, if only because I was willing to bend the rules or, if necessary, completely ignore them in order to get the job done right the first time." There was a bit of a smirk on the Hunter's face then. "Did your father ever tell you how many times I got cited by the Federation for whatever infraction they said I'd made?"

Leviathan had trouble keeping her smile in check at that. "He's insinuated that you could be unpredictable, but we never got much more than a groan out of him when we pressed for details about that." Her grin became somewhat impish then. "I don't think he wanted us taking after you in that regard."

That earned a hearty laugh from Zero. "Yeah, sounds about right for your father. Goodness knows he detested it when the Zeroth's command staff started taking after me in regards to my general disdain for paperwork. I can see him trying to avoid any of my bad habits from bleeding over to the team I'd be working with once I was pulled from stasis," even if his condition when he'd been recovered was far different than what he'd expected.

"Try not to give Fefnir any ideas, then," Leviathan said with a shake of her head. "Bad ideas become good ideas when they pass through his processor."

"Don't worry, I've found myself on the wrong end of his buster already," and Zero had to hold back a bit of a wistful expression. "Puts me in mind of a certain gunner we knew when the kid was just getting started."

"He's matured a bit since Father first activated him, but he's still got a lot of room for improvement," and Harpuia glanced to his sister, "though it seems that this latest stint of Phantom's didn't do much to help in that department."

"I think we should lay off teasing him for a while," Leviathan agreed, her voice falling to a softer timbre. "He really isn't taking to all of this well." Well, the charade they'd been pulling, at any rate. Not that she herself had an active role in that. "With any luck, things will settle in the city quickly and we can focus on getting back to normal."

The lift came to a stop, doors opening, and Zero was the first one out, taking point as he moved for the ground level entrance to the tower (one of them, anyway) and out into the rain-drenched city. "Enker!" he called out, seeing the Wilybot posted nearby, attention cast out toward the city.

There were the remnants of Pantheons littered around the courtyard here and there, though not nearly so many as were in the manufacturing district where Blues was taken down. The Lightning Lords and Fan Fiends were holding a tight perimeter, a visually intimidating display. Of course, they were armed and not at all afraid to use their weapons to defend their position.

Enker was actually seated the stone walls shoring up one of the flowerbeds on the Tower's front, one knee tucked up, his arms wrapped around it as the other leg dangled down, the tip of his armored boot resting against the ground. His staff was tucked under his arm as it rested against the ground, the shaft nearly touching his cheek, but he did straighten and look to Zero when he was addressed. He looked to be around Forte's age, a few years older than Rock was designed to be, though he wasn't a loose rocket the way the Seventh Number was. "Heading out?" Honestly, part of Enker was glad for the company, momentary as it was. This guard post was _boring._

"In a moment," Zero replied, his gaze shifting to the mess that littered the courtyard, one eyebrow raising at the sight of an unconscious unit in a tangled mess some distance from where Enker was seated, and it only took a moment of staring at the upside-down unit before Zero looked to Harpuia and thumbed toward the unit. "One of yours?"

"Lieutenant General Aztec Falcon, and yes," and the eldest of the AXRs couldn't fight down the embarrassed blush at his commander finding one of his senior units in such a state.

"I'd be guessing that's your work, since it's far too clean for Forte," Zero chimed as he turned back to his brother. "Though you look rather bored. Easy perimeter setup?"

Enker looked over to where Aztec laid unconscious, the felled Reploid's armor slick with rainwater. "Once he went down, the others scrambled back," he admitted. Enker turned his head, his gaze moving over Leviathan and Harpuia thoughtfully. "He was cocky. No one should be _that_ confident when facing a new opponent." For all his bravado, Enker was still going in with all the caution he could muster. He shifted on the brickwork, one hand moving along the shaft of his staff as he found a more comfortable position. "Once the others ran away, I just kind of sat here." And the Wilybot shrugged at that. There was nothing more to be done for the moment.

The look in Zero's eyes was a bit calculating, as if trying to figure something out, and there was a momentary glance back towards Harpuia before Zero smirked. "Well, better to be sitting down here with a moment to breathe than trying to keep the firestarter in line, though I think Break will be keeping him quiet for the time being. On that note, though, any idea where Shadow is?"

"Leaving him here with me was only a feint. The Second Numbers just didn't want him up there when they initially stormed in. He'd have gone in shooting." And Enker left it at that. "And Shadow's…" Enker trailed off at that, tilting his head and blinking in a way that was very unlike a Wilybot. "He's a ninja. Hold on a second." When Shadow was in ninja mode, the most prudent way to find him wasn't to go digging under very rock you saw, hoping to strike pay dirt. Instead, Enker reached out over the network, his signal slow and undulating, the motion an unspoken call on the Wilybot network for Shadow to answer the phone.

After a moment, he did.

"Shadow's still up with Quick and Metal," Enker finally answered. "Do you need him?"

"If he's busy, it can wait," and Zero fell silent for a moment. "I just hope they're not ripping into him too hard about what happened out there today with Commander Break."

"That's Break's damn fault," Enker returned, some definite irritation in his voice despite none of it being aimed at those present. "He constructs a solid plan and the second it's executed, he just veers off to…I don't even know where." Enker motioned uselessly with one arm into the distance as he spoke. "He's a pain to work with."

"Still, for all the trouble it caused, he did have the five of you prepped as backup in the event of something along that vein, and I honestly cannot think of a way this could have gone off better, save for what happened to him." Zero shrugged. "He puts me in mind of my old Commander, though Signas was never quite so…" and the Wilybot found himself at a loss for words.

"Be careful of Break," Enker warned. "He's rarely actually _malicious_ toward others, but his sense of self is skewed. His logic chains concerning himself are trashed. He had us prepped as backup _because_ of what happened to him, not _in case_ of it." Enker sighed after that, rubbing the side of his helmet with his free hand. "I'll let Shadow know you're looking for him."

Zero made a face at Enker's warning, a mix of apprehension and disappointment, though it was clear that neither emotion was aimed at the elder Wilybot. "Well, regardless of the why, I still appreciate your efforts in the city. Besides," and he smirked slightly, "can't really complain when I got to meet a few more of my siblings. And let Shadow know that I need to speak with him when he's got a free minute, but it's not really priority at the moment." He didn't want to step on any toes right now; his request could wait until the Second Numbers were done talking to Shadow.

"It might take a minute," Enker shrugged, then looked slowly over the defensive line of mechaniloids spread out on the grounds. "Should probably have someone come grab the Lieutenant General, though. He knocked himself out pretty good."

Rather than backing off and relying on his non-specialized combat skill, Aztec had continued to ramp up his electrical attacks until the reflected energy was too much for him to bear.

"I'm sure Shadow will know how to find me when he can," and Zero rested a hand on Enker's shoulder. "You alright waiting here until someone provides amended orders?"

Enker's gaze followed Zero's motions for the barest of moments, the Robot Master considering his unspoken offer. In one motion, Enker slid off the shoring, stretching slightly as he rested his staff against one shoulder. "I think Air's subordinates can handle the perimeter now that we've established control." At this point, Enker would take just about any offer to relieve his boredom.

"Alright," and Zero started heading for the main gate, waving to Harpuia and Leviathan to follow him.

"Lieutenant Commander," Harpuia piped up, a bit quiet considering their company, "but shouldn't we be heading out to the residential district?"

"Hopefully, Commander Break unlocked the city Trans Servers, but just in case, send a message to your father, let him know that we need access and that someone from Medical needs to be sent down here to grab your lieutenant. And while we're on the subject of _your team_, care to tell me how long Aztec's been under your command?"

Leviathan blinked at Zero's sudden shift of tone, a chill running through her at how _similar_ it sounded to X's when he was sorely disappointed. "You sound upset, Lieutenant Commander."

"It takes a special kind of stupid, or an even more _talented_ brand of oblivious, to see how your main attack set is being turned against you and keep using the same methodology, as if repeating the same failure will somehow make things work. I just hope that your medical team is good at patching battered units back together, because once Aztec is back on his feet, I'm going to be talking to X about starting a training regimen for him that I'll be overseeing _personally_."

Harpuia _blanched_.

"He _did_ try different attacks," Enker offered, though his tone didn't remotely imply that he was trying to speak up for the Reploid. "He didn't seem too willing to drop the charge, though, and I sure wasn't going to help him figure it out," and that was punctuated by another shrug.

"So you can turn attacks back on your opponent?" Leviathan asked, still unsure what to make of this unit.

"Among other things."

"You never answered my initial question," and Zero looked over his shoulder at Harpuia, "and did you ever get through to X?"

"A team is being sent down to retrieve the lieutenant, we have access to the Trans Servers, and Aztec's just short of making eight years with the Rekku," the general answered somewhat abashedly.

"That's far too long to abide by his attitude. Zeroth rookies had eight _weeks_ to straighten up or ship out; you're letting the unit get away with being stupid and reckless, and that is not something that will be continuing under my watch."

"Not to question your motives or intent, sir, but where would he go otherwise?"

Zero was quiet for a long moment as they continued walking toward the nearest Trans Server, thankful that he'd thought to download Phantom's copies of the city maps early on in the ninja's stay with the Resistance. When he finally spoke, his voice had lost a bit of its malicious tone. "Until he proves himself able to adapt in the field, he'll be treated as a Senior Cadet and allowed no closer to field duty than the simulation deck."

Even Leviathan paled a bit at the scope of the demotion he'd just ordered for Aztec and mentally, she was pondering her own lieutenants and their weaknesses on the battlefield.

She'd have to make sure they'd not make fools of her in front of Master Zero.

* * *

><p>X stepped off the lift onto the roof terrace of Neo Arcadia Tower, eyes drifting up to the breaking cloud cover and the hint of blue sky beyond. Clear pools of rainwater dotted the deck, glinting softly with the sunlight peeking through the clouds, and X moved slowly, not out of fear that he'd slip, but to take in the feeling of the cool breeze passing over the city, to hear the splash of the water as he stepped into a puddle. Moving to the railing at the edge of the deck, he let his fingers glide over the metal, his gloves growing damp as the cloth absorbed the water, eyes turning downward to take in the sweeping view of the city—<em>his city<em>—for the first time in four years.

His wireless signal reached out to the city relays, inputting a code he knew by heart, finally linking into the network. His eyes went wide as he heard the song on the network, turning to look to Blues, surprise evident on his face.

As absolutely tired as his eyes made Blues look, he still smirked and stepped forward when X turned back to look at him. Normally, he'd have stepped around the puddles, but with himself such a mess already? The rainwater would probably clean his boots off some. He stopped maybe two feet behind X, his gaze wandering outward, over the city, to the horizon. It really was a wonderful view. "Compared to the full force of the Harmony, these ten songs are nothing," he told X, tilting his head to look the younger unit in the eye. "Would you like me to allow you broadcast access?"

X nodded. "Just for the military units. I'll handle talking to the residents later." Those he wanted to talk to personally. If this city was to be fixed, if all this was to be made right again, he wouldn't allow himself to be shunted into his tower and walled in by the citizens. This time, he'd do right by them by refusing the pedestal they wanted him to stand on, even if he and Zero would preside over the city.

Blues nodded and undid the lock restricting X's communication over the network. Or rather, the lock restricting the Neo Arcadian military from being able to hear him. Blues stepped forward again then, pausing at the railing, still looking over the city, still taking in its size. It was _massive._ The other units were doing the same behind him and Rock trotted up beside X, slipping his hand into X's and smiling reassuringly up to the android.

'_Attention, all units of the Neo Arcadian military on active combat assignments within the Eden Dome,_' X began, giving the units in the city a chance to recognize his presence, his voice. Part of him wondered just how long it had been since they'd heard that voice over the network. '_All units, this is Commander X, broadcasting from Neo Arcadia Tower, with orders to stand down. All offensive and defensive activities within the Eden Dome are to cease immediately. Within the last hour, a massive system hack disabled our city, and enemy units attacked Neo Arcadia. I want to…I want to confirm these reports,_' and X knew there was likely a mixture of shock and panic running through the units. '_I also feel it necessary to inform you that I was the unit leading the effort._'

Rock squeezed X's hand in reassurance, the smaller unit silent as those on the network that were blocked from speaking. He was looking down over the city as well, though the top of the railing was barely below his armpits. He didn't need to be empathetically linked to those in the military to understand what kind of massive panic and confusion they must have felt in the past hour.

He hoped they'd be relieved when they found out that it was over and that even though there'd been a shift in power up top, it'd mean only good things for those in the city.

'_As several of you should remember,_' X continued, '_four years ago, members of the Jin'en and Rekku forces were able to recover the Dark Elf, who was then brought back to the city. What you may not be aware of is the procedures that followed her capture._' X stopped for a moment, figuring out how best to relay the information without causing any more problems than they had to deal with already. '_The eight months I spent in maintenance after her sealing was actually a cover story, an official fabrication in order to hide the fact that my body had been turned into the final seal on Dark Elf's prison. For the past four years, the unit you have all been serving under was a copy, a unit meant to look and act like me, bearing my own programming until such time as the Dark Elf could be purified and I could be returned to my body. The Resistance that several of you have undoubtedly been told was an enemy of the city was in fact my organization, working to counter the rule of the copy once it became clear that his intentions did not follow my own wishes for our city. This past hour has seen the copy unit removed from power and I have resumed my guardianship over this city. I expect all mobilized units back to the tower within the hour, and all senior officers are to report to the briefing level at no later than thirteen-hundred hours._' X looked out over his city once more, smiling proudly. '_That is all,_' and he stepped back from the railing, pulling Rock closer as he embraced both Rock and Blues in a warm, tight hug.

Rock relaxed right into the hug, but Blues' eyes widened with rarely-seen surprise. He didn't pull away or otherwise resist the embrace, but the unit was honestly a little bit lost. He hadn't been expecting that, not at all. Such was his surprise that he was very, very late in raising his free arm up to return the embrace, gentle and unsure as the gesture was.

X pulled away from the embrace after a few moments, laughing quietly at the red stains dotting his armor. "Well, looks like we'll all be needing to get cleaned up," though X didn't necessarily mind. "Rock, if you don't mind, I'd like to head down to my room and get…presentable before the military hauls their collective rears back here. Would you mind doing me a huge favor and going over this body's programming sets? I just want to make sure that what's installed is only what's mine," well, with the exclusion of Copy X's memory files. He wanted to keep those for now.

Rock hardly noticed that his own clothing was stained from the coolant soaking Blues', and his head bobbed as he nodded to X. "I'd be happy to, X." Of course he didn't mind. Why would he?

Blues merely looked down at himself again for several moments, frowning slightly at the state of his being even though he already knew his clothes were ruined.

It'd have been nice if those Neo Arcadian researchers had left his armor on him. He could have dealt with the maintenance to bring it back up to spec.

Hyleg should be grateful: had Blues had his armor, he very well may not have survived the encounter.

"Blues, do you have a cable on hand for the link? I'd prefer it if Rock were doing this directly."

Blues shook his head: he hadn't brought anything like that along on the raid. He looked to Elec then, the First Number meeting his gaze immediately. "Go and retrieve those still at the Resistance Base. Get a cable while you're there," _and anything else of use,_ Blues' expression communicated. They wouldn't be returning.

Elec nodded, though really, it almost looked like a bow before he glanced to X, affirming that the unit had no issues with this.

"They'll need time to remove all our things," X noted. "Would you be able to afford any other units to help?" and his gaze flickered to Quick and Metal before turning to Elec. "And could you please let Ciel know that she needs to report to the tower, not the residential district?"

"I'll let her know," Elec nodded to X.

Blues considered this for a moment, then turned to Elec, "Call your subordinate units to you if you must. Ice, go with him. Get them all moved out before thirteen hundred hours," so Ice and Elec could be back in time for this 'meeting'.

Ice nodded, "If we call our units in to help, it'll get done quickly." He smiled softly to X, sending confidence and assurance over their link. "We'll be back before you know it."

X nodded as they teleported away, looking to the remaining Robot Masters. "If you'd like to settle in before the meeting, there's a room on the floor just below here. It's…I guess a den would be the best thing to call it," and he looked at Blues for a moment, as if wary about letting the unit into that particular room as he currently was.

Reploids certainly _were_ a messy bunch when it came down to it. Elec and Ice hadn't bled at all.

Quick took a moment to look Blues over at X's tone, and he frowned at the sight. "At the very least, let them hose you down."

"A real bath will suffice," Blues said quickly, frowning slightly as though responding to some kind of inside joke.

Rock couldn't hide the smile creeping wider across his face. Roll had been _so angry_ when they'd all come home so dirty that time. The water from the garden hose had been _cold_, too.

"There's a bathroom in my quarters," X offered.

"That'll work," Blues said before Quick could continue on that tangent, completely ignoring the amused look on Rock's face.

"I'll see everyone downstairs then," X said, moving for the stairwell next to the lift. He was almost like a newbuilt again, touching, feeling, testing how he moved, learning his motor functions, moving, _living_. His steps were even, perhaps a bit hurried, as he descended, the android raising his auditory receptivity just a bit higher to really _hear_ the sound of his booted feet hitting each step as he moved. His hand grazed the railing, even as the glove covering the digits cut some of the sensation from his fingers.

Rock bounded after X, reaching up to the android, almost running into him from behind when he reached the stairwell.

Blues' movements were a bit stiff, moving more slowly than X was, though it wasn't because he wanted to pause to enjoy the view. At least this attack wasn't as bad as the two he had at the base. Really, he was lucky Phoenix knocked him out when he did, in a way. It stopped his core's fit cold. The gashes on the side of his face hurt, though, and even the wind worrying the synthetic skin was prickling his pain sensors.

He could turn them off, certainly, but turning _everything_ off was beyond stressful on a system, and when his was already so taxed? No, these cuts were nothing compared to what his core could be putting him through.

The Second Numbers watched X and Rock descend and once the units were out of earshot, Metal turned to look to Blues. "If you were going to station Shadow with the 001 unit to begin with, you should have sent for us to come immediately," he said.

"We won't tell you how to run your own Harmony, but don't disrupt ours. Take your own welfare into consideration. You've more to consider than just yourself." And Air stopped at that, though by the thrum on the network, there was so much he was leaving unsaid.

Silently, Blues moved forward, stepping down into the stairwell and descending without so much as a glance back.


	46. Eden's Crimson Death

_Well, it certainly has been a while. I would like to open this Authors' Notes with an apology for the lack of updates. We know many of you have been disappointed with Redemption's impromptu and prolonged hiatus. A lot's happened in the past months. Most importantly, Midnyght gave birth to a healthy baby girl earlier this month, and that alone should explain the extended silence on our end. Hormonal shifts do an amazing job of interrupting the muses, but we should be back in the swing of things. Motherhood, even the second time around, is an exhausting and time-consuming endeavor, but we do hope to continue updates on a more regular schedule, though we will not be able to promise the same weekly updates we initially had. We really hope you're still up for the ride, because this roller coaster? Is just getting good. _

_-HarunaRei_

* * *

><p>"We had a small group of Robot Masters come in after Commander Blues went offline," Zero said, walking through the residential district with Colbor and Hirondelle, several Resistance members moving through the streets as they carted boxes of supplies from the Resistance base, "which is why the order for the perimeter guard never got issued."<p>

"More units?" Hirondelle asked, looking over his shoulder at the unit that was moving just a couple steps behind Zero.

Zero nodded. "Things got a bit tossed around at the end there, but your team did a great job in getting the citizenry off the streets, so at least the major part of your assignment went off as planned. Besides, all's well that—" and Zero cut himself off as a local communication request came through. "Leviathan, half block down that way. Seems we have a rogue batch of Pantheon on the streets. See if you can't get them settled down."

Leviathan's salute was still filled with decorum even if the Neo Arcadian General was darting down the street in short order, surprisingly agile on land despite being a marine combat unit. She was already demanding answers from the unit that was in charge of the Pantheon squads in this sector: _none_ of them should have been ordered back onto patrol. The dead air that responded made her grit her teeth, and she had to pull up the patrol schedule to see _why_ the Lieutenant wasn't responding.

Ourobockle wouldn't be conscious for a few hours yet, and no one had picked up his slack.

Enker watched her dart off, his gaze scrutinizing despite the relatively neutral expression he was carrying. He'd listened to the idle chatter between Leviathan and Harpuia, more gathering information to gain some sort of perspective on this place than anything else. While yes, they'd been briefed, it'd been just that: _brief._ Data was useful no matter where it was from, and all the better if it could be interpreted into something more than a clutter of offhand information. Overall, it really was a beautiful city and it was readily apparent that a great deal of care was taken in its upkeep, so that was a plus.

Then again, didn't pretty much every human city he'd ever been to have both beautiful sectors and slums?

Heather and the other PZ units had already moved to different points in the residential district with orders from Phantom to rendezvous with the Resistance members there and provide help wherever they could. When Phantom caught sight of a few patrolling Pantheons some distance away from where he was, though, he'd been quick to divert from his intended destination—and he hoped his commander wouldn't be upset with him for it—to see what he could do to settle these units before they started an unnecessary firefight in this area.

He'd been moving along the roofs and balconies of the buildings to try and close in on them, thankful they were managing to avoid the Resistance members so far, and had been closing in when he saw his sister intercept the Pantheons, urging himself to move just a little bit faster as they raised their arms against her.

While she wasn't specialized in ground combat, Fairy Leviathan was hardly a slouch, and when the Pantheons raised their weapons to her, she immediately sent the lead unit a wireless request, the request automatically flagged as priority due to her rank.

The Pantheon nearest her stopped, the optic flickering and dilating some, before he authorized the link. '_General Leviathan, you are flagged as hostile by our system and marked with a Custodial Directive on suspicion of Maverick affiliation. Please stand down or we will be forced to take measures to ensure your compliance._'

This wasn't the first time Phantom had piggybacked on a local link, and he was _quite_ relieved that he'd done so, dropping down behind the Pantheons and ordering a link request with the same unit Leviathan was talking to. '_Pantheon unit, stand down. Master X has redacted those orders._' A bit of a crock, considering he didn't even know if X had come across the orders yet, but still the quickest way to get the units to stand down and return to base. '_Who is your commanding officer?_'

'_Lieutenant Ourobockle, sir,_' the unit responded. '_Without access to the security network mainframe, General Phantom, we cannot acknowledge such rescinding, doubly so with you marked for retirement._'

Phantom nodded, quickly linking up with his father and providing the Pantheon's contact code, as well as a request to have the orders found and pulled from the city network. On the heels of that, he sent another command to Rikar, another of the PZ Resistance members, to ensure that all of Hyleg's Pantheon squads were made aware of the current situation and ordered back to the Tower.

They'd only respond to Zan'ei directions, operating as they currently were.

The Pantheon shifted suddenly, a third link coming through, and he acknowledged X's link, as well as the amended orders, in a matter of moments. Turning, he nodded to Leviathan, a single motion directing the rest of the units to lower their arms. '_My apologies, General. Master X has provided new orders. We are to return to the Tower and await further instructions once we arrive._'

'_Ensure that all units with similar orders are given the amended instructions to review,_' Leviathan ordered the Pantheon, unable to hear what Phantom was saying to his own units. She did lower her ranseur, however, a signal to the Pantheon that she was permitting it to continue on its business. She looked to Phantom then, more mild curiosity in her gaze than anything else.

"You alright? Cut it kind of close there, though that Custodial Directive was unexpected."

"Thank you," and Leviathan held her hands out, palms open. "Not a scratch on me," so yes, she was alright. "I'm worried there are more like that on the streets, though."

"Rikar's taking a few more Zan'ei to clear them if they are," and he ticked his head to the side. "Let's get back to Commander Zero, see where he needs us next."

* * *

><p>Zero hefted one of the smaller boxes from where it had fallen, handing it to Colbor. "Let's make sure we get everything shipped from base as soon as possible. I'll send new orders if anything comes up."<p>

"What about me, Lieutenant Commander?" Harpuia asked suddenly, having remained quiet for most of the trip.

"You're with me until I get in touch with Shadow," Zero explained. "I have a rather important task set aside for you."

Hirondelle watched Colbor as he moved to catch up with the other two Resistance members before returning to the matters he and Zero had been discussing. "The major points of concern now are getting the military back to order after this, getting what of the citizenry that weren't working for us up-to-date, and directing our efforts on finding and retrieving Dark Elf."

Zero frowned a bit at that, though he stopped and turned when he saw a light blue beam of light, smiling at Ice once the unit teleported in. "Coming from the tower or the base?" he asked, saluting the unit.

"The base," Ice replied, looking around for a moment before tilting his head, focusing for a moment. "Stand still, I've got incoming," he quickly added, waiting to confirm that yes, they were going to be holding still before three dozen units teleported in formation to Ice's side, taking obstacles like buildings or trees into account. They were a mixture of Crazy Razy and Peng units, and each was carrying something. Some of them had boxes, others bundles, but they shifted and marched back into a more coherent formation on the street behind Ice before stopping and awaiting orders. "We thought it'd be quicker to move this way," the little Lightbot said cheerfully.

"It probably is," Zero said, looking over the units. "We're moving pretty much everything from the base over to that block," and he hesitated before asking in a softer voice, "Has anyone started moving the boxes from the…from personnel storage on the sixth level?"

Ice's gaze softened. "No, not yet. When we realized what was there, we asked Ciel what she wanted done with it. I think she wants the Resistance members to carry it out, so we concentrated on the supply rooms and labs instead."

"X is probably going to ask that we move those to the tower, but I'll check in later to make sure," Zero said with a nod. "Let me not hold you up, though," and he pointed down the street he'd been walking along for the past few minutes. "Like I said, we're gathering everything back that way."

"I can show Ice where if you'll not be needing me for the time being," Hirondelle offered, the senior intelligence officer careful to drop the 'Master' appellation.

"Thank you," Ice said, ever polite, and as he began walking, his units fell into line behind him, looking more like a well-trained unit than _mechaniloids._

Zero's gaze moved to the tower as the Robot Master and his subordinates continued down the avenue, and the only thing that stopped him from sending a message along to X regarding those containers on the sixth level was Phantom and Leviathan running up to him. "Everything okay?" That there hadn't been buster fire was a sign, but he still preferred at least something resembling a report from the two of them, especially considering Phantom hadn't been tasked with seeing to the Pantheons.

"The Pantheons have been given new order sets," Leviathan reported, saluting as she spoke. "And we shouldn't be having any more issues with them."

Like a flicker against his wireless signal, Shadow finally reached out to Zero, the Wilybot's voice reserved once Zero validated the connection. '_Is everything alright?_'

Zero raised a hand to cut Phantom off before the general could add to Leviathan's comment, his attention focused on the link with his brother. '_For the most part. I was trying to get in touch with you to see if you had the specifications for Commander Break's clothing. Considering the condition it was all in when we got to the Tower, it'd be easier to just replace everything._'

There was a soft hum over the link, part amusement, part agreement. While Shadow didn't have Break's clothing specs _specifically_, he knew what the unit was wearing (and always wondered why the hell he dressed like he had somewhere to be), and was familiar enough with human clothing styles to know where to look in the city's database to find the data that Break had deposited when he had his clothing generated those weeks prior. Shadow _did_ have the older unit's measurements if only because the Robot Masters scanned nearly _everything_ they came across almost without considering it, and he put the numbers up to the patterns and devised the specs before forwarding them to the android. '_That should do it,'_ Shadow said as Zero accepted the transfer, waiting to make sure it was successful before disengaging the link.

Zero nodded, mostly to himself, and turned to Phantom as he queried Harpuia for a link. "Continue."

"My unit is scouring the streets for the remainder of Lieutenant General Ourobockle's patrol teams and will be issuing the same orders that Father gave the team we intercepted."

"Alright," and the blond looked to Harpuia when he realized the link still hadn't been accepted. "You _were_ curious as to your assignment, weren't you?"

Harpuia blinked, immediately accepting the link and the file transfer that was waiting for him. "Sorry, Lieutenant Commander."

"As soon as that upload is finished, I want you to head to the manufacturing district and place the order, priority ship to the Tower. We need to be heading back there shortly as it stands, as X does want us present for the meeting with what's _left_ of the lieutenants. Make sure you the first thing on the list is marked top priority; I want you delivering it to your uncle _before_ the meeting starts, so don't take longer than necessary."

"Understood, Lieutenant Commander," and the moment the transfer finished, Harpuia shut down the link and took to the skies.

Phantom tilted his head to the side, a look of confusion on his face before he looked to his sister. "Harpy's acting like someone kicked him."

"We came across Lieutenant Falcon while on our way out," lying in a puddle, unconscious, "And he lost his fight quite spectacularly," and Leviathan's voice dropped slightly as she continued. "The Lieutenant Commander wasn't pleased with how Falcon approached the battle and he's received a demotion until such a time that he can prove his merit."

The Zan'ei commander hesitated a moment before asking, "How far down?"

"_Senior Cadet_," Leviathan said, her gaze flickering over first Zero, then his brother that had beaten Aztec so soundly. "The Lieutenant Commander was _not pleased._"

"I would imagine not," and Phantom was just barely able to keep himself from flinching at exactly what that kind of knock down the rankings meant for Aztec.

"Don't think your units are above reproach simply because I haven't seen them in action," Zero said, cutting into their conversation. "Should I find any of them to be lacking, they'll be removed from field duty same as Aztec."

Leviathan's gaze met Zero's, and her voice was steady as she said, "If any of mine are found to be so inept, Lieutenant Commander, _I _will remove them from field duty."

Phantom was careful to hide the rising tide of worry knotting in his abdomen when he realized that _two_ of his lieutenants had ended up in the medical wing in the wake of their attack on the city. A small part of him hoped that Zero would at least give them some leeway, seeing as it was _Blues_ they'd ended up fighting.

* * *

><p>Rock was poking around X's 'den' with round eyes, inspecting everything the way a newbuilt would. When X called it a den, Rock expected, well, a den. But this?<p>

This room was huge, expansive, lavish, extravagant. Rock seriously doubted that a lot of this was X's choice in style, suspected that a large part of this was putting on appearances and meeting expectations, but _still_.

The only thing that kept him from flopping onto one of the (very squishy) couches was the fact that he was still very damp.

"We still have another floor to go down, Rock," X said. "You and I both got coolant on us, and I'd like to change outfits before I have company."

Rock blinked and looked up to X. The child considered him for a moment, then trotted over, looking a little bit worried. "I didn't touch anything." Or get it dirty. Really.

X ruffled Rock's hair. "I'm not worried about that," he said reassuringly. "And you'll have more than enough time to hang out up here once we get everything back into some semblance of order," and X frowned as he moved across the network. For them to have consolidated everything like this was…

"Let's get downstairs so we can get cleaned up. If things go smoothly, we'll all be able to settle in the den tonight and spend some quality family time together. I'll even have the kids up if you'd like," especially since Rock hadn't really gotten to meet Fefnir yet.

Rock slid his hand back into X's, smiling softly as he looked up to the taller unit. "How many people are going to be there?"

At that moment, Blues came down the stairs, pausing a moment to look around the room as he took in _why_ X may not want him lounging around down here right now. As it was, he stepped carefully and made his way over to X, even as Forte and Metal trailed behind.

Quick and Air had remained up on the desk for the time being.

"Counting the Robot Masters," X said, moving for the stairs leading down to his main quarters, "and the military units that should be here, somewhere around thirty or so." Turning his head as they continued on, X smiled a bit at Forte. "I don't think we've had a chance for a formal introduction," X said.

"Fuck off," Forte said, Gospel staying close to his side.

X blinked a bit at the unit's curt reply, but shook his head. In a way, he was relieved to know that this unit was one of Zero's siblings.

It wouldn't stop X from trying to be nice to him, but it certainly made the attitude a little easier to deal with.

"I see your vocabulary hasn't expanded any," Blues sighed as he leaned down to check Rock. Over the link, the child sent a happy greeting even though it'd been barely two minutes since they'd last seen one another. "Where is the bathroom?" Blues asked then, tilting his head to look to X. Now that he had the opportunity, he decided that yes, he'd rather get cleaned up and changed.

"_Piss off_," Forte snapped back.

"I'll show you once we're in the room," X replied, almost hopping off the bottom step as he moved down the hall and to the door. The portal swung open on command, and X let out a relieved sigh. Letting go of Rock's hand, he quickly moved over to a blank space of wall, pressing against it to trigger the pressure sensor in this door. "The bedroom's back here, and the bathroom is over there," X said, pointing somewhere to the left of the doorway. "You should fit decently well into what clothes I have, providing Copy X didn't trash my belongings, so do you want me to pick out something until you can get your outfit…" X stopped, reassessing the damage, and smiled, although a bit timidly. "Until you get your outfit replaced?"

Forte moved ahead of Blues, pushing his way past Rock and X as he moved into the bedroom, walking over to the window that took up a large portion of the main wall, and dropped to the floor.

Gospel hung back a bit, though only for a moment, and then moved next to his Master, laying down near the unit's feet.

"If it's not too much trouble," Blues said after a moment's consideration. He'd really ruined his current clothing set. "And this is Forte," Blues added as almost an afterthought, gesturing toward the Wilybot. "He's one of the Seventh Numbers, so he's on the younger end of the scale. Mid-adolescent." Though honestly, some of the Seventh Numbers from the main batch were mentally much older than Forte now. At first, Blues suspected that Forte had an age cap as well, though it was incongruous with Wily. Once he got a decent scan on the unit, he verified that there was no cap, just an incredibly stubborn unit.

"Well, whether or not you appreciate the gesture, it's nice to meet you, Forte," X said, then nodded to Blues. "I don't mind, really. As long as Copy X didn't have a field day with my belongings—and by the state of my office, he didn't—I should have something." He looked to Rock. "If you'd like to, I might have something that would fit as long as you can salvage the belt from your outfit."

Forte just leaned against the window in reply, letting himself take in the view of the city and hoping that some time in a different room would make the Eldest at least a little less angry with him.

Blues moved over to where X indicated where the bathroom was, and after a moment of considering the panel, he brought up the hand that _hadn't_ seen the shoulder joint of Lieutenant Ourobockle and touched it, lightly, his head turning as the door slid open. At least the coolant on that hand was dry: he hadn't wanted to leave an imprint on the wall.

And the bathroom wasn't trashed. It wouldn't make sense for the Copy to thrash the apartment, though, not when he had to live here during his short few years.

Part of him was bothered. Not that X killed the Copy, but because the unit needed to die to begin with. The copy of Rock honestly hadn't known he wasn't Rock, not until he saw Wily's logo, saw the evil chip, in his neck armor like a cancer. Even then, the little one had turned to _him_, had looked to him with trembling eyes, and asked if it were true, his aura on the network all but _begging_ him to say it wasn't so.

That entire incident…he'd disliked Wily before that, thought the man was insane before that, but at that point? That point, Blues thought, was when he truly began to despise the human.

The copy of X had none of X's memories, that much was evident without confirmation. He'd known he wasn't the real thing. It made Blues wonder if he ever even realized that the city had long since spiraled from his grasp, that he was too young to handle this, that it wasn't something he knew how to bear. There was something to say about bravado, about how those in their youth felt invincible, but there had to have been a point where the Copy realized that he needed more support than he was getting. Why not tell the Guardians, or the Judges? Was he afraid of retirement? Well, by the time it became late, retirements were being handed out like candies on Halloween. Blues wouldn't have put it past the Judges to pass an order like that while blinded in their rage.

At the same time, if it'd gone well, and it'd have gone better if the Copy told the Guardians first, the social climate around the young unit would have instantly shifted, and much of the reins of the city would have been removed from his uncertain hands.

That brought up the issue of whatever individual removed the Copy from his cradle, from Ciel's lab, and finished him, finished his logic programming. The unit was undoubtedly fed lies to the brim, told to keep quiet about it, told that the city would just crumble without a 'Master X' at the helm. Continuous bad direction from an individual that sought to harm the city, to kill it slowly, and no available direction from those that _would_ have been able to help him.

He was set up to die, the same as Copy Rock. His inability to admit he wasn't who he claimed to be, his inability to admit he'd been wrong, and his inability to step down was what killed him in the end. Had he been the least bit reasonable, Blues was certain, X would have laid a much softer hand on him.

The android was just like that.

Moving further into the room, X disengaged his bracers, pressing his hand against another panel and stepping into the lab there. Setting the armor down on one of the tables, he hit the releases for his vest, removing that as well, and then grabbing a cloth to wipe his hands off on, pulling as much moisture and coolant from the gloves as he could. Tossing the cloth onto his armor, he moved back for the bedroom, rifling through the clothes stored in the closet.

Rock followed X over to the closet, but rather than rifle through the clothes as well, he picked up one of X's discarded bracers, then blinked down to the vest. It'd looked like a normal cloth vest, but the way it'd disengaged…

Rock reached down, felt it, tested it with his hand, his eyes widening slightly. This was _armor._ He initiated a scan on it, now immensely curious. And oh wow, it was effective despite appearances. It was lighter than the armor the Robot Masters wore, lighter than the armor X was originally built with, but it also wasn't built for things like explosions.

Unlikely as an explosion was. Rock turned to look back to X then, "Did he leave your things okay?" There might be some new items in there, and in the back of his mind, Rock wondered whether the Copy cleared out X's old wardrobe and ordered entirely new clothing for himself.

"Part of me is honestly wondering if he even _knew_ about the rooms. The lab's almost pristine," and that was only in part because of the little mechaniloids that X had built to keep the room in order for him, "and my clothes look relatively untouched." And, thankfully, the clothing was made of a material that didn't age or degrade unless it was worn into something more explosive than a Council session. Grabbing a new undersuit and a long sleeveless coat, X moved back for the lab.

Blues touched the door panel from the inside of the bathroom and the door slid shut with a soft swishing sound. He ran the bath after considering the controls for a moment, then located the linen closet. At least the towels were close at hand.

He hadn't taken many baths before. He'd taken a few, certainly, when he was still with Doctor Light, but with Wily, he woke up on that lab table already cleaned up. After the fourth war, the only times he really bathed was when he was in a fight that was messy, like the one today, or when he visited the Cossacks and they insisted they wash his clothes. It went unsaid that he'd wash up, too.

The first thing off was his scarf and he folded it neatly. He hesitated a moment, his gaze moving around the bathroom, before deciding to just pile the ruined clothes on the floor and let X deal with it.

The tiles should clean up easily, anyway.

His boots and socks were next. Trench coat, vest, shirt, pants, they were all folded and neatly piled together. The undersuit was the last thing to go. The first few that Doctor Light made had zippers in the back, but then he came up with a way for the fabric to be form-fitting, but still stretchy enough to pull off relatively easily. He folded that off and piled it on top of the others, then turned back to the tub.

There was a large mirror on the wall beside it, from the rim of the tub almost to the ceiling. He understood was that it made the room look larger due to the reflection. He considered this own reflection for a moment. The gashes on his head were more prominent than he'd thought and without his sunglasses, the dark circles under his eyes were very, very visible. He'd always had them in some form, but after Wily, it just got worse.

Perhaps if there was a way for him to have a working power system without sacrificing much of who he was, he wouldn't have to look this way. Or feel this sick all the time. He'd looked his own coding over time and again over the years. Even though he knew that he himself couldn't overwrite it, he scoured it for any way to bring him back to some semblance of healthy.

The only viable option he could come up with was a complete systems wipe. His death.

He stepped into the tub, turning so his back was to the mirror, and turned his attention to his body, to the coolant that was already tingeing the bath water a slight pink. It really didn't take long to wash it off, the synthetic skin didn't stain as easily as clothing. It was surprisingly durable. Normally, he'd have washed his hair, too, but with the gashes on his head, the waterproof seal was broken and while being submerged probably wouldn't _kill_ him, it'd lead to a lot of complications, not to mention that he'd need to have his skin and the shock-absorbent padding beneath it completely removed and replaced.

Instead, he read the contents of the shampoo, cataloguing the ingredients and mentally determining if it was even advisable to use with synthetic parts. He'd knew, even as he read the ingredients for the body wash, that honestly, if they were here, in a _Reploid's_ bathroom, they'd be safe.

The Third Law disagreed and while it wasn't an imperative he couldn't ignore, it was easier to just get that programming satisfied so it'd be _quiet_ for a while.

Even with him moving so slowly, the bath didn't take as long as Zero's did in the Resistance Base and he was up and wrapped in a towel in under ten minutes.

While Blues was in the bathroom, X had asked Rock to wait outside the lab, at least long enough for X to switch out his current undersuit for the new one he'd grabbed, and had quickly changed. Pulling on one of the long white lab coats, just to cover himself up a little better, X exited the lab and went right back into his closet. It didn't take long for him to pull out a few articles of clothing, folding them and setting them aside until he'd gathered an entire outfit, sans shoes.

He'd considered giving the clothes to Rock to take to their brother, but with the little unit still wearing his wet (and somewhat coolant-stained) clothes, X figured it would be better for him to drop the items off.

"You might not want to go in there looking like that," Forte said, though his gaze hadn't turned from the window. "Blues doesn't take kindly to lab techs."

"I'll be fine," X said, "but thanks for your concern."

"It's not concern," Forte responded, his tone a bit harsher. "I couldn't give less of a damn about you."

Shaking his head, X knocked against the door. "Blues, I have your clothes together."

Blues hadn't been out of the tub long at all, his gaze trailing over the door for a moment, having to take a moment to remember that X was knocking because humans considered it an invasion of privacy to be walked in on in the bath. He pressed his hand to the door panel again, the other holding the towel in place where it was around his waist, even though he'd tucked it securely. When the door slid open, Blues focused in on the lab coat X was wearing for a moment, and though his facial expression didn't shift at all, he was taken aback by it. It took him a moment to even remember to say, "Thank you." For the clothing. And the bath.

"It's not a problem," X replied. "Let me know if…" and X's voice dropped off, his eyes taking in a large scar that ran around Blues' waist. "What happened?"

Blues' brows knitted in slight confusion, not at all following the line of X's gaze. "What?"

"The scar," X asked. "What happened?"

Blues looked down then, his hand teasing the uneven, discolored skin there for a moment, frowning slightly. "I don't know why they kept it there when they reskinned me," though honestly, if it survived with him this long, he may as well keep it. "I sustained this injury during one of the uprisings," and not a Wily War proper. "One of Doctor Wily's units went rogue and stood against him, against humanity, and against any mechanical unit that didn't stand with him."

X leaned to the side, following the line of the scar, and there was a soft shudder in his eyes when he realized that it reached almost completely around Blues' midsection. X opened his mouth, as if ready to ask for more details, then closed it again, forcing his gaze elsewhere in the room and finding the pile of clothes, a bit surprised that Blues had bothered to fold the items, messy and ruined as they were."If you'd like, I can see what I can do about cleaning your boots," he said after a moment, looking back up to his brother. A frown came to his face at the scratches still so prominent on the side of Blues' head, and X sent a request down to the medical staff to bring a swatch of synth-skin up for a patch, providing the measurements and coloration details.

X hoped Blues and Rock wouldn't chide him for making the request without informing them, though part of him was sure that Blues had caught the transmission anyway. Since he was back on the city net and all; Blues' song was the strongest of the ten.

"I don't know whether the stains will come out of them, but they're not completely ruined." Blues was silent for a moment before continuing, "Forte and Rock dispatched King in the end," though he'd barely gotten up in time to help, and it'd been sorely needed. "It's not painful, if that's what you're worried about. He…was thorough with the repairs." Blues reached out and took the fresh clothes from X then, his intense gaze still centered on the android.

"Forte and…?" and X turned to look at the Wilybot sitting by the window, opting to let the conversation drop. "I was just surprised is all. It's…not a common occurrence to have scars, so it threw me a bit," and brought old memories to the fore. "Let me know if you need anything else."

"This will be fine for now, thank you," Blues said before stepping back into the bathroom. He waited for X to turn to move away before closing the door and dropping the towel. He was somewhat relieved to see that X chose normal clothing, clothing in line with what he'd been wearing before and not the…odd style that seemed to be in fashion in the city. The vests honestly made him think of childrens' clothing from 20XX, not that he was going to vocalize that.

He also noted, with a prickle of amusement and mild confusion, that X even included underwear in the outfit. With a bit of a shrug, he pulled the clothes on. Waste not, want not.

"Rock," X said as he moved back into his closet, one door sliding shut as another opened, "is the belt on your outfit in any condition to be worn?" Seeing as the material wasn't really absorbent, a quick run over it with a towel should remove whatever water was clinging to it, but it was still a good idea to check before he gave Rock new clothes.

"It's fine," Rock answered, quickly undoing the buckle and pulling the belt from his waist. "It was treated with something," he'd noticed it was waterproofed when he first pulled it on, all those days ago.

X nodded as he got back to his feet. "I don't have much in your size, but I think these will do okay for now." Once X had a chance to look at Blues and Rock's boots, he'd be able to send someone on a run for new clothes for Rock and shoes for the both of them. "If you'd like to take a quick shower or a bath, that's fine. We still have time before people are going to show up."

"I think I should," Rock said with a slightly sheepish smile. He hadn't been in armor and honestly, he needed to get cleaned up. Rock accepted the clothes, looking through them quickly. It was a pair of khaki shorts, though they wouldn't be short on Rock at all, and a collared shirt. Not button-down, but still nicer than a tee.

"Alright. If anyone needs me, I'm going to be in the lab. Hopefully, I make myself presentable without taking too long." X looked down to Rock's feet for a moment. "Actually, before you hop in the bath, could you bring me yours and Blues' boots so I can see what can be done with them before the meeting?"

"Sure, X," Rock replied. He went to the bathroom, but rather than knocking first, he let himself right in, smiling up at Blues as he retrieved his boots. The older unit was nearly done getting dressed, just pulling his socks on, but Rock didn't need to ask to take them. Blues already knew: their link was as active as ever.

X took the boots, careful to keep from getting any of the various fluids marring either pair onto his hands, and headed back into the lab as Rock entered the bathroom. Setting the two pairs of footwear on a different table, he quickly scanned them, pulling up the records of his scan of Rock from back when he'd first been supplied with clothing at the Resistance base once the data from the boots had been collected, and forwarded the information to another unit in the Tower.

Once the unit had confirmed the data transfer had finished and that he was headed out for the manufacturing district, X turned to his own outfit. Grabbing a pair of maintenance gloves, he started cleaning the vest he'd been wearing, he grabbed a few bottles from one of the cabinets, dabbing the various liquids onto the spots where his hugging Blues and Rock had transferred coolant onto the fabric. Once that was sufficiently treated, he set two of the maintenance units in the room to finish the cleaning process, his attention moving to the six pieces of armor he still had to wipe down. The boots and pelvic armor had taken next to no time, each of the pieces warped off to storage as X finished with each of them. The bracers had taken a bit longer if only because X needed to wear them—unlike Rock and Blues, X couldn't arm his busters unless he was properly equipped—and he slipped the metal bands into place once they'd been dried, having removed his lab coat to avoid catching the sleeves as the armor readjusted and secured to his forearms.

Moving to another section of the room, the wall panel slid back to reveal the more formal of his outfits, usually reserved for meetings such as the one he'd be attending in just a few hours. Like much of their gear, the soft material that made up his pants hid the fact that there was titanium mesh reinforcing it, making it a light-grade armor instead of simple clothing, and he pulled on the pants, a nano-scale anchoring system securing the clothing to his undersuit. The next piece of clothing was the vest, styled much like the one he normally wore, though it covered his entire torso instead of just the area where his power core was centralized. Pulling the armor on, he took the coat from the chair he'd tossed it on, pulling it on over the vest and working to secure the small latches that connected the two pieces. The boots he warped on beneath his pants legs then were less bulky than his normal combat gear but no less combat ready.

A small part of X wondered why no one had ever bothered questioning why Copy X had taken to the habit of attending whatever he was doing in his combat gear instead of his Council regalia.

As Blues left the bathroom, Rock went in. Rock's movements in the bathroom nearly mirrored Blues'. He grabbed the towel first, then pulled his clothes off and folded them up neatly. He put them beside Blues'. It may have seemed odd for the two of them to fold the clothing, but it was easier to carry that way rather than a random bundle. And besides, if something had to be out, it should look presentable, not left tossed about on the floor.

Rock took a little bit longer in the bath than Blues did, partly because he was dunking his head under and playing a bit, and partly because he washed his hair. It'd been a while and really, it was soothing. He was glad Doctor Light built them to be able to do this.

The young unit toweled off quickly, taking care to get his hair as dry as he could before getting dressed. He tried hiking the shorts up, but it really wasn't working, so he let them rest at their normal length and cinched his belt up, double-checking that they wouldn't fall down. He waited until the end to pull the socks on and carefully avoided the wet places on the floor as he made his way to the door and slipped back into X's room.

X stepped out of the lab at almost the same time, helmet in one hand as he cleaned off the last piece of armor, looking to Rock and smiling. "You look adorable," he admitted, the child looking almost comically out of place in the clothes he was wearing.

"You look like Roll roped your ass into playing dress-up," Forte quipped from the window.

Rock looked down to himself. He wasn't the type to prescribe to vanity, so he really didn't mind it, especially given the situation. He was just glad to be in some dry clothes. "If she had, there'd be a lot more red," Rock finally said. He managed to keep the melancholy out of his voice, though there was a flash of it in his eyes.

X had to resist the urge to glare at Forte, somehow sure that the motion would only spur the Wilybot to additional comments about the Light family and the situation that the Robot Masters had found themselves in, both in Neo Arcadia and in 22XX. Kneeling, X wrapped his arms around Rock, pulling him close.

Rock smiled softly and reached his arms around X's shoulders, leaning into the hug. He didn't comment further on his sister, though; he really didn't want to talk about it, not right now. He'd noticed that X changed armors in the lab, into a more formal chest piece and an overcoat. He thought it looked nice, unfamiliar as the style was, and he sent a warm feeling of approval for it over their link.

Smiling at Rock, X pressed a soft kiss to the unit's forehead before standing, running the small rag he had over the crystal on his helmet quickly before pulling the armor on, adjusting it a bit. "If you like the outfit, I can see what can be done about having one designed for you."

"If it's okay," Rock said, all smiles. X's helmet had changed some from when Doctor Light designed him back in 20XX, but the basic design remained the same. Part of why X was so keen on getting him new clothes, Rock realized, may be because the Resistance uniform was now outdated: they'd triumphed, so the function of their organization would be changing. Looking around, Rock realized that Blues wasn't in the room, but a quick query via link revealed that he'd just gone upstairs, to the den.

"It won't be a problem," X said. "Right now, I want to get everyone settled. Come tomorrow morning, we'll start in on fixing everything that's wrong with this city, maybe send a couple of teams out to the farming colonies, see how their systems are faring and get updated coding." X frowned a bit. "I should probably sit down with someone and come up with a new city seal for the Robot Masters."

Querying Blues for his location, X looked up to the ceiling of the room, rolling his eyes even as he smiled. '_You plan on staying up there until the meeting starts?_'

The smirk was nearly audible in the link as Blues replied, '_Do you intend to stay down there?_'

"City seal?" Rock asked, blinking.

X nodded, searching through his own memory files for the seven designs and forwarding them to Rock. "The first three are the city's government, manufacturing, and research seals," blue, red, and green, respectively. "The other four are the seals for each of the kids' military divisions. By having one of those seven seals on your person in some way," though some units didn't wear theirs, "you are noted as being in a position of authority in the city." X pointed to the blue emblem on the left side of his overcoat. "As you saw with the files I forwarded, this is the government's seal."

Rock nodded slowly, his head tilted slightly as he considered, one of his hands slipping up and taking X's. "You want to give us official clearance?" Rock was touched. "What district would we be, though?"

"I'll probably leave that up to Blues, seeing where he stands in the hierarchy. It's not fair for me to make a decision without his input." Straightening his coat again, X fidgeted a bit, then looked to Forte. "You're welcome to join us at the meeting," he said.

"Already figured that," Forte said.

"Is there any particular reason you're moping about in my room?" X asked.

"I'm not moping," Forte replied. "I'm sitting on my ass waiting for whatever the hell I'm waiting for."

"Would you like to head up to the den until the meeting?" X offered. "There's more room for you to sit up there, and actual couches instead of the floor. That can't be comfortable."

"Fuck off, Lightbot," the unit snapped. "I'll go where I damn well please, I'll sit where I damn well please, and stop trying to fucking patronize me."

X sighed, rubbing at bridge of his nose. "I'm not trying to come off like that, Forte. I'm simply offering the invitation and treating you as I would treat I would my family and friends."

Forte's eyes darted from the window for a moment, looking at the android, then back out to the city below. Despite the plethora of insults he could have made, he remained silent, one hand running along Gospel's back.

"Well, we'll be upstairs," Rock said, tugging slightly on X's hand to coax the android toward the stairs.

Upstairs, Blues was lounging on one of the couches, linked in equally to the Neo Arcadian network, and the individual networks for the Lightbots and Wilybots. Metal was leaning against the wall, opting to pass on the couches because, well, the blades on his armor weren't just decorative. The two of them had been quietly talking via link, though not in an open format, and by the feeling from Air over the link, some of his units had come by to check in with him.

X had been halfway up the stairs when a priority link request came through, and X stared at the peripheral display for only a moment before verifying the link. '_Harpuia, what's wrong?_'

'_I…Lieutenant Commander Zero sent me on a special assignment, but I'm having a bit of trouble completing it. Could you do me a favor and ask one of the Robot Masters to rescind whatever order is keeping the mechaniloids in hiding?_'

'_Why didn't you just send a request to Blues and—_'

'_No! Not Uncle Blues! The assignment is in relation to him,_' and Harpuia fell silent for a moment. '_Sorry, Father._'

'_Don't worry about it. And I'll talk to Metal in a moment,_' X sent. '_Was that all?_'

'_Yes, and thank you._'

X smirked. '_You're welcome, Harpy,_' he replied, then cut the connection as he pinged Metal for a private communications connection.

Metal blinked, though his momentary surprise didn't cause a resonance in his links to Blues and his brothers, and accepted X's request for a private line. He, like Shadow before him, wasn't as demanding of data from X as the Lightbots were, didn't inundate the unit with half a dozen requests for status reports. He only did a surface-level status check, and then, _'Is something the matter?'_ Because honestly, Metal would expect X to ask Rock or Blues if he had a question, not him.

'_Harpuia requested that someone redact the order keeping the city mechaniloids in hiding,_' X said. '_He didn't give specific details as to why, though._'

Metal blinked, his furrowed brow hidden behind his helmet, his frown hidden by his mask. He reached out over the network, to the mechaniloids in the city, and each unit willingly displayed its orders, almost bowing as the Robot Master examined each order set and redacted all those that'd been issued the order to keep their heads low. It was alright now, they could return to work. About fifteen seconds after X finished speaking, Metal responded with, '_The order's been redacted and all mechaniloid units have been instructed to resume their previous duties._'

Blues noted the change in orders, but didn't pay much heed: the siege was over, so it made sense for the units to return to work.

Moving to one of the couches near where Blues was sitting, X took a seat on the plush furniture, relaxing into the soft material before beckoning Rock over to him. "We've got about an hour before the meeting is set to start," and X rested his head against the back of the couch, pulling up the deployment logs and seeing what units had made it back to base and who was still out in the field.

Rock crawled up, onto the couch beside X, the little unit sinking down into the cushions beside the android and cuddling into his side, curling into the warmth.

Blues had been laying with his head lolled a bit back, but he picked his head up when Rock and X came upstairs, his gaze flickering to the stairwell behind them for a moment: it appeared that Forte was content with holing up downstairs.

Well, so long as he didn't make a mess and still attended the meeting, Blues didn't care either way.

* * *

><p>Stepping onto the lift, X took a deep, steadying breath, closing his eyes for a moment as he set the command for the lift to take him down to the floor the military was gathering on. He'd been in contact with Phantom and Leviathan for a time, ensuring that they brought along the three Resistance members that needed to attend the meeting, and had cleared it with Fefnir and Air that the Judges would be present as well, though Air's subordinate units had been relieved of guard duty.<p>

Even Flizard had settled down after they'd been escorted from the Council room.

Just a few minutes before, he'd told Blues that he wanted the Robot Masters to hang back, to wait for his signal. There was a lot he had to get the senior officers caught up on, and X smiled as he opened his eyes again, resting a hand on Rock's shoulders. "I'm nervous," he admitted with a soft smile.

Rock blinked and looked up to X. He was somewhat more presentable now: when he'd gone to the den and once Blues actually got a good look at him, the older unit had gone back downstairs and retrieved a comb for Rock's hair. His shirt was a pale blue and on the left side, in place of a pocket, was the insignia for the Neo Arcadian government, though it was outlined in gold. Rock was glad that X had gotten him some clothes that fit to wear. The khaki shorts he'd worn in the interim were comfy, but they were ill-fitted and not ideal if he was going to anything remotely formal. "Because it's been so long since you've done this?" Rock asked, tilting his head slightly.

"In a setting like this, yes," X said. "As it stands, I only headed the Resistance for a little more than a year, so I feel horribly…well, not out of practice, but a bit out of place, I guess." He smiled again towards his brother as the lift came to a stop, and his posture straightened, his presence all military formality, as he moved for the door to the main area of the briefing level. He stopped just before the door, standing at attention, and he reached to Rock, rested a hand on his shoulder, to stop him.

Rock stopped immediately and blinked up to X again, the expression on his face and feeling over their link effectively summed up by the innocent tilt to his head and the curiosity in his eyes. "What's wrong?" Rock asked, though he kept his voice low, so as not to be heard beyond the door.

"Nothing," X answered. "I'm simply waiting. I said thirteen-hundred hours," and all the units that he ordered to meet him were at least logged as having returned to the tower, though Magnion, Falcon, and Ourobockle were all going to be absent. As the final ten seconds began to count down, X moved forward, the door swinging open on command, and he strode into the room, Rock on his heels.

Rock's gaze wandered over the occupants of the room for a moment, but a Hoppider clinging to the ceiling near one of the corners caught his gaze for just a bit longer, even if he didn't automatically slow the way a human would have with their head turned.

Leviathan turned her head to the door when it swung open, her father walking in, carrying himself as though he _hadn't_ been absent for the past four years. Rock was following rather closely behind him and really, it was kind of cute the way the child was keeping tucked close to her father. When she caught sight of Rock's clothing, or rather, the _insignia_ on it, her eyes widened.

That kind of gold border, the kind she had on her own crest, was reserved for only the highest ranking officials within the walls of Neo Arcadia.

Hanumachine straightened some the moment the doors went open, his gaze moving to the city's senior commanding officer and the unit at his side. He blinked as he got a better look at Rock, astounded by the similarities between the two, by the purpose in the shorter unit's stride, so confident despite his apparent age. Just who _was_ this child unit that looked like a younger version of X? More interestingly, he saw the way a few of the Judges shifted in place as they saw the pair move, obvious unease in their body language, though the Zan'ei Lieutenant General could not place exactly what had them on edge.

And for a unit so young in appearance to be wearing the government's gold-edged seal?

One hand tightened around his staff as he waited for the meeting to begin, letting his mind settle for the moment. If Master X did not address who this little one was—or where they'd found Master Zero, for that matter—he'd ask himself once X opened the floor to them.

Fefnir watched the miniaturized version of his father walking in stride with X, and he had to admit to himself that seeing them side-by-side like this made the resemblance all the more uncanny compared to when he had first been informed about the similarity by Harpuia. When his gaze caught the insignia that he hoped everyone else noticed—a pointed look was thrown in Anubis' general direction at that thought—he couldn't help but let loose a quiet "Well, what do you know?" under his breath.

X nodded to the three Resistance members standing on the far side of the room, a silent acknowledgment of their presence, and his gaze shifted up to the three enormous viewscreens covering the back wall of the room for a moment. He wondered just how long it had been since there'd been a _proper_ military briefing of any sort in this room. He resisted the urge to trail his hand over the controls for the screens, leaving them off for the time being, and as he turned to face the assembled units, he sent a request to Rock to grab one of the chairs from a nearby terminal.

Rock responded over the link with a contented affirmation and he trotted over to the terminal to wheel the chair over, blinking as he considered its position, and then moved back to X's side. He reached up to take one of X's hands in his own then, his gaze wandering back over the occupants of the room, though he didn't look the least bit shy or intimidated. Just curious.

"Master X," Blizzack Staggroff began, falling silent as X cut him off with a wave of his hand.

"In due time, Lieutenant General," X said. "As I am certain that a number of you are confused by my earlier announcement over the network, I wanted to address the events that transpired this morning and the actions taken by the Resistance to reclaim this city." A few quiet murmurs passed between the assembly, though X was certain far more conversations were going on over local wireless. "The first point of concern I'd like to address is my statement regarding my body serving as the final seal over Dark Elf's prison. In the months following her capture, I worked with a team of engineers to create the system that would keep her contained without harming her. She is, after all, still Mother Elf beneath the warped coding attached to her systems by Weil before the Elf Wars," and X stopped for a second at the way Judge Inarabitta seemed to perk up at his words. "During the final stages of the sealing, we used my security programming to add in an unfamiliar element to the system keeping her bound. Unfortunately, she tried to use the direct connection to my processor to escape and, in the process, left my body offline. For the years since, I have been present only as a Cyber Elf."

"It appears you've had quite a few trials of your own in these past few years," Anubis interjected. "Although I have to wonder just how you got your body back."

X and Fefnir both cast disapproving looks at the unit, though X's glare was weakened by the tired sigh that escaped him before he admitted, "I did not." A wave of discomfort and guilt washed over him then, and he hoped he'd had enough presence of mind to keep that from transmitting across his links with the Robot Masters. "Without a means to purge Dark Elf, I could not, in good conscience, attempt to reclaim that body."

A mixture of confusion and surprise appeared on Fefnir's face as he began counting off the prisoners that were assembled within the meeting room, a horrific realization dawning upon him as he made note that Copy X—the main culprit behind the four years of devastation the city was recently freed from—was nowhere to be seen. Even in the Council chamber, the replicate unit had been absent by the time Fefnir arrived. He looked to his father and put the final few pieces together. '_No…you didn't. He was terrible, but…_' Fefnir found himself unable to finish that thought and simply kept his eyes on the ground, trying to keep the sickened expression on his face from being seen.

Kuwagust was the next to speak, shifting a bit in place before asking, "If you have headed the Resistance and stood against the unit that had been ruling in your stead, why wait so long to topple him and reclaim the city?"

Another tired sigh slipped from X at that, and he shook his head. He'd _had_ a speech of sorts figured out for this, but it seemed as if they individuals here were all content to interrupt and ask for details in their own time.

The frown on Zero's face made it all the more evident to X that _neither_ of them had expected this brash kind of disrespect for the commanding officer of the Neo Arcadian military.

Even as his elders, they'd never spoken out of turn like this to Commander Signas, not during the briefings and strategy meetings and other similar official events.

"May I—"

"I would have assumed that the senior military officers of Neo Arcadia would have more respect for their CO than what I'm witnessing here," Zero snapped, his voice curt and sharp without being overly loud, his eyes narrowed slightly as he looked over those present. "Even the junior cadets, fresh into the system, were never so ill-mannered and disrespectful of their commanding officers, and I'd think all of you old enough to not act like bratty children clamoring for their parent's attention."

Even the Judges were taken aback by Zero's words, a tense silence falling over the assembled before Zero turned and bowed to X. "Commander, the floor is yours," and it was clear—even without him saying as much—that further interruptions would not be handled in the same manner.

A soft nod from the elder android, and X gave Rock's hand a gentle squeeze before pulling his hand from the elder Lightbot's grip. "There are several points of concern, several faults within my city that have been present since my disappearance and the replicate taking command, and I intend to address them as swiftly as possible. Four years I've been absent from this city, and in those four years, the lot of you have managed to send how many thousands of otherwise innocent Reploids to the scrapyards as if their lives weren't worth the energy they were requiring for charge. All of you," and a pointed look was thrown at the Judges then, "knew of my feelings regarding so much of what you just _allowed _to happen, and you simply bowed down to this replicate simply because he _looked_ like me? I have half a mind to send all of you in for full scans to make sure your processors haven't shorted out since the last time I stood before you."

"Master X, with all due respect—"

"I don't _want_ your petty excuses!" X roared, his last thread of patience wearing terribly thin by this point. "And don't think that I'm solely targeting the lot of you serving under my children, because even _they and the Arcadian Council_ managed to do things that are so counter to the way I was running things before that I'm curious to know how many of you decided to turn off your logic programs alongside your emotional ones!" His gaze was sharp as it passed over the assembled crowd, anger barely kept in check by the way Rock was reaching out to him over the link, tenuous as that connection was.

"I assigned several tasks to various branches of my military for the sole reason that I knew they would be able to follow through with these details, yet both the Zan'ei and Jin'en dropped the ball with the Eden Dome patrols. I'd have to discuss with my co-commander just how many infiltration missions we ran that went wholly undetected by the city over our four years of operation," and his accusing gaze shifted to the two sons that headed the military divisions he was currently discussing. "And while we're on the topic, let's touch on how the Zan'ei are supposed to monitor any questionable extranet communications traffic and someone still managed to order the replicate unit built not just with _my full blueprints_, which are _supposed_ to be saved to a secure internal server here in the Tower, but ordered under the direction of a Neo Arcadian government division that _doesn't exist_.

"What of the energy crisis? Yes, we were dealing with it before the shift in power, but how could _any_ of you authorize the rationing of energy to the civilian populace with over-draws punishable by retirement? You've taken the whole of our race and reduced us to second-class citizens that are barely fit to walk the same streets as the humans even though we've sacrificed just as much as they have. Rather than addressing the source of the problem or working to develop alternate ways to address the core problem, you instead try to control usage by _lowering_ the population of those who need that resource? Genocide has _never_ been an acceptable practice, whether under my command or the Federation's!"

A harsh look to his eldest then. "And when, may I ask, did you receive an order to stop sending Rekku patrols out to the terraforming colonies? I told you, years ago, that there was nothing more important than trying to get people living somewhere other than the Eden Dome simply because a cage was still a cage, no matter how gilded its bars. Instead, I hear from the agents we have within the Zan'ei that all the terraforming projects have been _halted_ and the teams returned to the Dome?" He did stop, then, a slight wave of his hand indicating that, yes, he _did, in fact_, want an answer from Harpuia.

The crests of the AXRs helmet pulled down and tight against the sides of his head—he'd already been dealt a major blow to his pride through Zero's response to Aztec's less-than-impressive combat tactics—and his voice was just a bit soft as he admitted, "Three months after the replicate took command of the city."

"And the reasoning?"

"Strained resources."

X shook his head at that, holding back from snapping that he'd taught the Rekku General better than that. "The same 'strained resources' that made it seem like a good idea to combine the entire city's digital interface onto _one_ network? I know more than a few of you are versed enough with the tech to know just how bad of an idea that was, and yet, here we are, with our military and civilian communications running on the same network as our teleportation grid, our security network, and a hundred other things that should have been left on their own, isolated networks. Trust me, there are far worse ways to burn energy than simply keeping the network servers separate and operational."

Silence fell over the room for a moment as X tried to gather his thoughts, going over what he'd already addressed while making sure that he hadn't missed anything yet. "Would anyone like to tell me when and how the decision was made to turn my Council into a tribunal of death where the accused weren't even allowed the right to defend themselves against the charges of emotional matrix operational allowances?" and even without looking, X could tell all three of the Resistance members standing behind him were shifting nervously in place.

All three of them, after all, still had active Orders of Retirement out against them for the exact 'crime' X had just asked about.

"Biblio," the android said sternly, turning to face the Judge. Aside from being the oldest of the eight, Volteel had often been the first to speak up as the voice of reason in the sessions prior to X's disappearance.

"Just shy of seven months into the copy's rule, Master X," the Judge admitted. "He claimed it would further expedite our proceedings to forgo the accused providing evidentiary testimony unless special considerations warranted full judiciary process. The lockdown on our emotional responses came a few weeks later."

"You had an accused break down during testimonial?"

Biblio blinked at that a few times before nodding. "Yes, sir."

"And the reason you thought the copy's judgment was sound in instating a lockdown that runs against one of the core reasons the Reploid secondary designation is 'human analogue'?"

This time, it was Inarabitta that answered, the Judge's voice nearly as small as he felt in that moment. "The accused in the case had initially responded to the evidence presented by crying, Master X, but when it became clear that judgment was not looking to fall in their favor," though, to be fair, some of the testimony _had_ swayed the Council to slightly mitigate the sentence, "they made an attempt on the copy's life. The Zan'ei stationed in the chamber…saw to the unit's retirement, and all of us were shocked to find the replicate visibly shaken by the attempt. Seeing as we believed him to be you, it…we passed it off as shock, seeing as even then, you'd become something of an icon to the city."

"'An idol set upon an ivory pedestal, pretty to look at but never to be touched', I believe I once said," and Inarabitta nodded at X, earning a quiet groan from the android. "I am going to see to it that this city's people stop treating me as such if it allowed the copy to so easily slip into my place," and he'd be going through the replicate unit's memories to try and see just who it was that had been pulling the strings.

The unit had been little more than a child; he couldn't have been working alone.

It was a moment longer before X spoke again, and it was clear in his tone that while he was still upset, most of his anger had dissipated, and his eyes were a touch softer as he nodded to the assembled units. "As many of you have likely noticed, Generals Phantom, Harpuia, and Leviathan have returned to the city, healthy and sound in both body and mind. The original Order of Retirement levied against Phantom was a ruse that was used as a means of escaping the city to join the Resistance. Harpuia and Leviathan's disappearances were also his work, and at no point since his original defection have Phantom or either of his siblings been exposed to anything even remotely close to the Maverick Virus," and he wasn't going to trouble those present any further by discussing the incident with the Omega Protocol. "With that said, I'm exerting my executive authority and officially rescinding all active Orders of Retirement related to the emotional matrix lockdown. Any unit so marked is cleared of all charges and suspicion against them, and any attempts to carry out an Order will have the unit or units involved brought up on charges of attempted murder." He didn't put it past his military to have a few loose cannons in their midst, especially considering the loose cannon he'd known during his service with the Hunters.

"Now, the…" and X halted then, noticing the way Hanumachine was almost worriedly gripping his staff. "Lieutenant General, something the matter?"

The unit was quiet for a moment, considering his words and the things that X had said thus far, before looking to the city's commander. "You said earlier that you could not reclaim your body without first having a means of purging Dark Elf," and he waited for X's nod before continuing. "Among those gathered here are the ones highest up in the government and military sectors, the ones held most responsible for the state of this city and her decay over the last few years, yet your replicate is not among us," and the Zan'ei Lieutenant saw more than a few eyes go wide with the revelation. "Forgive my presumption if I am wrong, but has justice already been meted out against the copy?"

X offered a silent nod in response, waiting for the resulting shock at his admission to die down some. "He would not return the city to me despite the fact that he no longer had control, despite all he has done to risk her safety and that of her people, human and Reploid alike," and while he knew it would be wise to address the loss of Dark Elf, there was one final point of concern before he started sending the military out to try and reclaim the missing Cyber Elf.

Even though his gaze didn't shift, X reached out to Rock. '_Did you forward coordinates to everyone?_'

'_I did,' _Rock responded immediately, and he had to force himself to not look to X, to not look like the two of them were chatting via link, saying things the others couldn't hear. He didn't want to spoil it. _'Each unit confirmed and is waiting on standby.'_

"Now, before we continue onto your new assignments, I would like to say that the Resistance only played a small part in the success of this siege of the city. It was an important part, yes," and X turned to nod at the three Resistance officers standing near Phantom, "as it was essential that we remove all civilians from the streets before we began our assault. However, the ones to whom I, and all of you by extension, owe thanks to for the overturning of the regime destroying Neo Arcadia, are the ones that brought down the network, that allowed the infiltration to occur as cleanly and efficiently as it did in the first place. A little over a month ago, an archaeology team found two old model units and brought them back to Neo Arcadia for study, only to lose them shortly thereafter. One of them," and X rested his hand on Rock's shoulder, "is not only my older brother, but also is my direct design progenitor." Looks of comprehension dawned on several faces at this, finally making the connection between the two units. "The other, also my brother," and X paused, eyes flicking up to the Hoppider in the corner of the room.

There was a soft, high-pitched tone, inundating in its fleeting existence, and six beams of colored light shot down into the room, behind and around the chair that Rock placed. The lights solidified near the bottom, and as the last, hot-bright vestiges of energy sparked and dissipated, six units took shape, formed and solidified.

Forte and Metal stood at either side of the chair, with Air and Quick behind it. Ice and Elec teleported down to the side nearer X, each unit carrying himself with the utmost confidence. They certainly weren't nervous about this, not in the slightest.

Several moments after, barely enough time to register what'd just happened, a seventh beam of light shot down directly onto the chair Rock placed only minutes before, and when it dissipated, Blues was seated in it, leaning back almost casually, one leg crossed over the other, looking more like these units were amassed in _his _room rather than him being a guest here.

"Stand _down_," Zero ordered the moment he saw a few of the lieutenants backing up, recognizing the positions they were taking, hearing the whispers of 'Maverick' dance across the room. "I would think that X's indication that they originate from a line _before_ his own would make it easy for you to understand that the RVISIA does not apply to them. They are not Maverick," not by the current definition of the word, anyway.

"I don't understand—" Panter Flauclaws began, only to be cut off by X's gaze.

"As I said, both units recovered are my brothers, though they are older than even I am," even if Rock didn't look it. "There is a great deal that they and their fellows can provide for our city, many things that they can help with that we have had trouble with in the past decade." X turned then, bowing deeply to Blues, and over the link, '_The floor is yours._'

"Thank you, X," Blues said, folding his hands in his lap as he turned his gaze over the units in the room, taking them in at length before speaking. "From what I'm told, a great deal of your historical records have been lost during the continuous wars that have ravaged the planet for the last three centuries, so it comes with little shock that everyone is so ill-informed when it comes to the…more distant past." Even if 300 years hardly constituted ancient history. "As X stated, none of the units here with red eyes are 'Maverick', as you call it, and we will not take kindly to any unwarranted aggression." And that was the only warning they'd be getting. "When I first left the city, I noted several issues with its facilities, namely the power and networking systems, while I had direct control of them. Since then, I've had an expert examine the power plant's coding after I determined that there'd been heavy tampering with it, and after we've gotten an opportunity to make a house call, a permanent fix to what's plaguing the city's power will be implemented. I will require a look at all other relevant facilities in the city, including the biodomes, to determine what changes need to be implemented to streamline, if any." And Blues highly doubted there'd be nothing to do. "There is a great deal that can be done, that _will _be done, and we will begin to implement these changes and improvements immediately."

"And you're okay with this, Master X?" Herculious asked, not having missed that this unit had failed to use Master X's title when he addressed him. "For people we've never known, the unit that took down the city that night, that led to—"

"That led to what?" Fefnir interrupted, sarcasm dripping from his voice as he leveled a dull stare at Herculious. "The city being _rescued_? Yeah, sure, I can see why you wouldn't trust them," and he let his words hang in the air for a moment before adding, "Just _shut up_ and let Dad _finish_."

It took X a moment to gather his thoughts up in the wake of his son's rather unexpected snark, and he shook his head lightly, looking to all of the assembled before speaking. "Part of what my brother is offering to this city are fixes to not just the systems, but the programming of those same systems. Rock and Blues," and X's hand tightened a bit on Rock's shoulder, "both excel at working with coding. Elec, although not formerly tasked with work in a geothermal plant, will be providing his expertise to getting the power plant back to normal operational specs. Each of the units here is a benefit and a blessing to our city, and while they may not be known to you, I have spent time with them, know them, trust them. To see what's been done for the Resistance in only just a month?" and that said nothing of Rocinolle's education and his own defense system.

"But the night of the attack," Kuwagust continued, knowing what his brother was asking about.

Blues was quick to cut off Kuwagust and Herculious' train of thought. "Disabling the city so was the safest way for me to gain exit with the fewest casualties. I did not order the city's defense force to fire upon anyone, much less the non-military population. I was shown the coding for some of the Pantheon units responsible: it, too, was littered with altered code and addendums that, I suspect, was implemented by the same individual who issued the power plant with the improper coding that is running it into the ground."

"How much of our city has been tampered with and damaged as such?" Judge Foxtar asked, daring to look up, to look at the unit that had, only a few hours ago, been facing a retirement order by a ruler that had no true authority.

"Without further examination, I cannot properly assess the extent of the damage. I can say, however, that everything that I have been handed from the city has been altered or adjusted, and never in ways that increase output or efficiency," Blues replied, not even turning his head to look at the Judge as he leaned back in his chair.

"And what of Telesphoros' work?" Cubit asked.

X looked to him at that, one eyebrow rising. "Inarabitta mentioned that name in the Council Chamber during the siege."

Cubit nodded. "He's a coder that offered to look at the plant's coding and not only offered to correct any issues therein, but also said that he'd be able to…" and the Judge's voice drifted suddenly, connecting the dots between X's outburst at the copy about the loss of Dark Elf and the work that Telesphoros had been discussing.

X gaze was pure confusion the moment Foxtar sent him a link request. "Cubit, what's the matter?" he asked, even as he verified the data transfer.

"This unit," he said, sending over a collection of image files, "claimed that he knew how to purify the Dark Elf, provided us with data on how it would be done, with the idea presented that her power could be used as an amplification mechanism for the power plant to correct what couldn't be fixed in the coding alone. He also provided updated coding for the plant itself."

X verified the link, downloading the image files, and there was a feel of abject terror that fired across his links with the Robot Masters once he got a good look at the unit. Even with the visor covering his eyes, X _knew_ who that was. "How did he even get clearance for such a project?" let alone get into the city?

"Through Master…through the copy," Foxtar replied. "Master X, what's wrong?"

It was only moments before every other Lightbot in the room was inundating X with demands of a status update and what could possibly have upset him so. That kind of terrified knee-jerk reaction never originated from a little bit of bad news.

That was like finding out there was a serial killer in your closet and _you can't move_.

When seven seconds passed and X still hadn't responded, Rock caught the android's hand, giving him a light tug before repeating Foxtar's question, "What's wrong?"

The android looked rather unsteady on his feet by that point, his eyes slightly unfocused as he tried to find his voice. "The main reason I called this session," and all the bluster from earlier had dissipated under the weight of his concern now that he _knew_ who had attacked Sanctum Yggdrasil, "was to alert the senior members of the city staff to an imminent threat to our city. Yesterday afternoon, this 'Telesphoros' was able to infiltrate Sanctum Yggdrasil, where the Dark Elf was kept, and kidnapped her." The dawning horror he saw overtake some of the units was to be expected; almost everyone knew of the devastation of the Elf Wars, even if only a scant few were alive who remembered it.

Rock was looking down to the ground now, already knowing where this was going even if he had no idea what'd transpired during the Elf Wars, what kind of hell on Earth the survivors saw, heard, felt, lived. That it was bad probably didn't begin to cover it, especially not with the dawning horror in the eyes of those in the room. The Dark Elf seemed to be something of a demon in the past, once they still feared, and deeply. They feared Dark Elf the way ancient Romans feared that the Emperor Caligula may come back to life and continue his reign of terror, even when his death had been decades prior.

"You speak of Telesphoros as if the name wasn't his own," Judge Mantisk noted.

And X's expression and signal dropped right back into a constant hum of concern and worry. "The…the unit Judge Foxtar called Telesphoros…" and X sighed, looking to Zero. "It's only an alias."

Zero considered the name for a moment before querying X for t he files, his expression quickly shifting to barely-contained anger, his hands balling into tight fights.

"Master X, if it's an alias," Childre asked, "then how do you know the unit?"

X sighed. "It's…hard not to remember some faces, some people. Telesphoros' real name…"

"Is Omega," Zero finished. "That…that…" and he was very _obviously_ furious about this turn of events, evidenced by the way he'd slipped straight into German. "_That son of a bitch has my daughter_."

The Robot Masters may not have been appropriately horrified by the revelation, but they had very little contextual data for what Omega was and is capable of. Blues had leaned back into his chair, considering. "We are on a very tight timeline, then," especially if someone so volatile, such an abomination, had something with the kind of power Dark Elf was described as having.

Leviathan felt like someone just punched her in the gut. That that macabre, maddened puppet was back, was back and pretending to be someone people could _trust_, someone people could _depend on,_ and doing it just to trick them further, to drag them down further into its twisted version of hell…

And as if Omega returning wasn't bad enough, they took the Dark Elf. Leviathan inhaled slowly, readjusting her center of balance as she suddenly felt very weak in the legs. There wasn't much that she could imagine making this situation even worse.

X took a steadying breath, letting the full weight of the situation hit him, well aware that everyone else in the room (with the exclusion of the Robot Masters) would be reeling at the news. "I expected far more commotion," he said, looking around the room. "You are all incredibly quiet."

"It's a lot to take in," Tech Kraken said, gaze moving to Phantom for a moment, "especially in wake of being told that our generals were not retired as we were led to believe, being told that we've been serving under someone who, in hindsight, we should have known wasn't you. Then, this…this discovery of your brothers, of Reploids…"

Panter looked to Kraken as the unit fell silent, picking up on a different train of thought. "And that says nothing of the sudden reappearance of Master Zero. Here we have been for so long, fighting against the Maverick scourge, trying to survive when everything falls apart, and now members of our race's past suddenly appear from nowhere? It's incredibly overwhelming to say the least, so to expect us to speak when we can think of so little to say?"

"The proper designation," Hirondelle piped up suddenly, "is Robot Master. Commander Blues and his forces are from the design line prior to the androids."

Phantom nodded. He'd caught that Kraken had used the wrong term, though he thought one of the Robot Masters would have corrected the usage. "My father said as much about Rock, but that point of discussion is deviating from the true concern."

X nodded. "Lieutenant Commander Zero, with your permission, I'd like to reassign the members of the Zeroth." It was time he started taking control of this city. He had people to protect.

"I have no argument against this, Commander," Zero answered, posture straight as he turned to face X and snapped to attention.

X nodded, though part of him knew that he was going to have to ask Zero at some point why he'd suddenly gotten a promotion. "We have a lead on who it is that's responsible for the disappearance of Dark Elf. Guardian Phantom, the Zan'ei will start their investigation as soon as possible. I want your troops to scour as much of this city as possible, find out if and where in this city Omega is hiding."

"Understood, Master X," Phantom said, bowing deeply. "All Zan'ei, outbound!"

Tech Kraken, Burble Hekelot, and Hanumachine all turned for the door, following Phantom out.

"Guardian Harpuia, I want the Rekku fleets mobilized for aerial reconnaissance. We have some time before sunset, so get the teams in the air. I want a fifty-mile radius around the Eden Dome scouted out. _Anything_ out of the ordinary: energy readings, ambient heat signatures, if it's out of place, you search the location. As per Neo Arcadian military protocol Tango-Seven-Kilo-Three-Eight, I want no less than six units on each team. Guardian Fefnir, have eight of your troops escort the Judges to their quarters and stand on guard. The rest of the Jin'en will be backing up Rekku patrols." He nodded to his sons.

"Understood, Master X," they replied, bowing and turning, their own troops falling in step behind them, the Judges trailing behind Fefnir.

"Guardian Leviathan, link up with the Meikai. Their current orders still stand, but any order to return to the city is prioritized."

"Understood, Master X," Leviathan said with a graceful bow, refusing to let the shell shock behind the idea that Omega was crawling in some dark corner even as they were speaking ruffle her outwardly. Inwardly, she took a moment to still her frantic mind, to make sure her mental voice was as calm as the water's surface, that it wouldn't belie the turmoil beneath. Only then did she link to her lieutenants, to her troops, to update them and to be certain they were still carrying out their orders, their patrols.

Now that units were beginning to leave the meeting room, some of the Robot Masters relaxed, shifted from their apparent stance at attention. They'd remained quiet the entire time, but that was only because they didn't need their mouths to speak. Their links had remained plenty active, and each unit had already accessed the archives to look up data on 'Omega'.

Blues remained relaxed in his seat, hands folded over his lap once again, his expression neutral as he stared ahead of him, not focusing so much on what was going on around him as he was this new information about Omega and the Dark Elf.

"General Leviathan, with your permission, I would like to return to my post," Poler Kamrous said. She turned her head to look at the Robot Masters, as if considering them.

Leviathan nodded to Poler. "Dismissed, Lieutenant Kamrous. I will be expecting your report."

"Of course, General," and Poler looked to X. "With your permission, Master X, and the permissions of your siblings, I would like to forward the coding set from my facility for review. Though I have no reason to believe the city defense grid has been compromised, I would rather know now than be taken by surprise." As it was, Kamrous was constantly wired in to the defense system, provided a steady stream of updates from the teams of engineers and technicians when official business called her away from the facility. Save for the time frames of the two attacks on the city that severed her connection to the network, she would have known if someone had tried directly accessing the facility.

Unlike Reploids, however, a remote hack could have been attempted. If so much of their city had been affected, no part of the system was excluded from examination.

"Your openness to our offer is appreciated," Blues said, oddly diplomatic even as he set up a mock Reploid account on the network to prompt the file transfer. The officials in the city were already far more accepting of this shift in the status quo than many of the Resistance members were, and if they were willing to dance, Blues would be happy to guide them through the steps.

He always took lead, though.

Poler nodded her head. "Thank you, Master Blues," she said, initiating the transfer from the facility and queuing the load to Blues to start as soon as she completed the upload of the current facility coding.

Blues didn't quite startle, but there was a hiccup in his motions, barely an instant, as though he'd begun a pre-programmed process and it took his processors a moment to locate and veto it. There was very little emotion on his face to convey the sudden spark of annoyance that lit up his song on the Harmony, that echoed in the links he had open with the other Robot Masters and X. It took Blues a moment or two to find his voice, or more accurately, to ensure that the compulsion was properly quashed before he spoke again, "I will send the updated versions to you as soon as I complete my review and adjustment."

Poler bowed her head. "Thank you," she said before turning and leaving.

X looked to Blues as soon as the unit had cleared the room, an apologetic look on his face. '_I'm fairly certain the military units are going to be using that designation unless something is said otherwise,_' and he'd heard the way Blues' song had shifted. '_Is there a title you would prefer over…that one?_'

'_I'd assumed that since they heard the Zero unit call me 'Commander', that they'd follow suit,' _but of course he wasn't that lucky, '_if they must use a title, then Commander, I suppose, or nothing at all._'

'_Considering the fact that you'll all likely be wearing a modified city seal somewhere on your person, they'll require that they use a title when addressing you,_' X said. He looked to the Resistance members, as if figuring out where they could be of use. "I need the three of you to head back to the residential district. Inform Lady Ciel that she is to join us in the Tower as soon as possible. Ensure that the boxes from personnel storage are brought up to my quarters by the end of the day as well. Beyond that, I want you to gather as many as you can with any technical application skills. We need to start removing the weapon upgrades on the Pantheons," since the units were never meant for more than observational patrols.

Wordlessly, Zero grabbed two of the chairs in the room, moving them over to where X and Rock were standing.

"Thank you," X said, taking a seat and leaning back into the chair a little.

Rock dropped nearly immediately into his chair, and he considered it a bit before moving it beside X's, the chair's wheels rolling easily. He made no effort to keep from bumping into X, though it was more the smaller unit's weight in motion than the chair he was sitting on that forced the android to plant his feet to keep from rolling away himself. Rock smiled up to X, completely unheeding of the distinct frowns that came to Ice and Elec's faces at that.

"What now?" Zero asked, at attention at X's side despite having had to shift a half-step to the side to avoid getting bumped when X's chair had moved.

"At this point…" and X drifted a bit. "Actually, while the whole 'commander' thing with Blues makes sense, why have you started using that to address me? You've pulled rank every chance you had while we were still with the Resistance."

"During our time with the Resistance, I felt it necessary to pull rank, and even then you went against a direct order. Here? Now? I made a promise that I would help you, would be at your side as we cared for this city and her people, but this is your city before it is ours." Zero smiled at X, though the expression was not as bright as it could have been. "I felt the title change was necessitated once we'd reclaimed the city."

X nodded, understanding Zero even if the unit's reasoning was a bit…quirky. "As for what now, we need reviews of all the city system coding sets, a chance for Elec to take a look at the plant, someone to get the network back out onto the disconnected servers," and X was almost infuriated by how unnecessarily complex the structure was when it was all operating as a single, interconnected network. "The Golems need to be moved out onto border patrol, keep a defensive perimeter up around the city," and X quickly sent that order along.

"That went more…smoothly than I anticipated," Elec said, remembering his own introduction to the Resistance and how some of the units were less than happy to have them there.

"Blues didn't give them an opportunity to dissent," Ice pointed out, slight amusement evident in his voice. Blues didn't ask to help: he told them they were getting help whether or not they wanted it.

"There's the additional fact of dealing with military units," X said. "There's not a lot of allowance for dissent in the ranks, especially when the unit outranks you, despite the way they were acting toward me during the meeting." It was part of the reason why he'd set up Rock's new clothes to bear the gold-edged government seal. "Levi, baby girl, you can sit down unless you've somewhere to be?"

Forte fidgeted a bit, though he remained standing at Blues' side, the occasional glare thrown at Zero.

"No, Father," Leviathan said as she stepped forward then, grabbing one of the terminal chairs and wheeling it over.

Ice was just about to just sit on the ground and make himself comfortable, but Forte's fidgeting caught the smaller unit's attention. "Forte, what's the matter?"

"This is a load of fucking bullshit," Forte said, pointing a thumb in Blues' direction. "I'm over here playing bodyguard to a 'bot who's older than dirt, and the pansy-ass blonde whatever-the-fuck that Wily built is playing second fiddle to a Lightbot that, by all rights, _took over the goddamned world_. Something got seriously screwed in the past few centuries, and I don't know how I'm dealing with this shit."

"Forte," Zero said, his tone a bit chiding.

"Don't fucking 'Forte' me," the unit snapped. "First off, I'm older than you, so you can bite whatever bullshit argument you might have for me even _thinking_ about listening to your girly ass. Secondly, what's this shit about you having a daughter? You're a damned Wilybot, but you're softer than half the damn_ Cossackbots_."

"Just because I happen to care about the people in my family doesn't mean that I'm soft, Forte," Zero said, actually turning to face the unit now. "And you can bet your sorry ass that I'm proud you compared me to Mikhail's sons."

"Well, Forte," Enker said as he dropped down to a crouch, then a sitting position, retracting his staff. "The fact that _your_ ability to contend with change is still nonexistent provides a stable anchor for the rest of us. I can rest assured that the world is still right knowing that you, at least, have not changed." The elder Wilybot tilted his head to look up to Forte, his expression not amused despite the teasing lilt to his voice. '_Perhaps, rather than shutting down when the world hasn't developed the way we were told to expect it to, we should assess the situation and redetermine our roles in this time, hm?'_

Answering Enker with a silent glare, Forte let loose a long string of insults over the link.

Enker only shrugged: Forte almost never took advice as it was dispensed.

"So, with all that's gone on and the situation at hand," X finally said, "where do you want to start?"

"It seems like we should be asking you that," Blues said slowly: X was the one who just wrested his home from an interloper. "But as it is, I'll review this coding set I received. Elec will go to the power plant and proceed with his preliminary examination. I would just like to be certain that his subordinate units would be able to assist without being…harassed by the staff there." And the ghost of a smirk crossed Blues' lips, "And it seems Rock would prefer to stay with you for the time being." The child was beyond relieved that X had a body now, and that he was stable and wasn't going to wink out of existence for the smallest of exertions.

X leaned over slightly at Blues' comment, one arm curling around Rock's shoulders and holding the unit close, even if he was giving his brother a rather lopsided hug in the process. "Elec's subordinate units shouldn't cause any issue as long as Elec is wearing or carrying something indicating that he has the authority to be in the area, which is why I asked for an edit to the city seal earlier, something to represent the Robot Masters while also providing access clearance for restricted areas."

"Commander X," Zero interrupted suddenly, his voice bearing no indication of his inner turmoil, "is there a simulation deck in the tower?"

X looked to Zero for a moment, mildly surprised by the question, then forwarded the access codes and floor information to Zero. "You'll be able to look over the testing simulation list once you log in."

Turning crisply on one heel, Zero headed out of the room.

X sighed heavily, leaning back into his chair again.

Multiple sets of eyes watched Zero leave the room, though no one queried as to why he was so upset. It was quiet for nearly a full minute before Blues spoke again, his posture straightening somewhat as he evidently came to some kind of decision.

"Ice, I want you to examine their water treatment facilities," make sure that was running smoothly even if it'd never been brought up in talks in the Resistance base. He left it unspoken that Air continue his examination of the weather control systems. He hadn't asked the Second Number to do it, but if he was feeling industrious in that regard, Blues certainly wouldn't complain.

X gave a curt nod in response to Ice's assignment, knowing that even that aspect of the city operations was at risk, and it was a moment before he pulled up a detailed map of Neo Arcadia Tower, looking over the multitude of floors. While almost three times more massive than the Maverick Hunter base, there weren't as many occupied floors, and X found two that weren't currently slated for use by any branch of the city. Looking over a more detailed map, X made a quick copy of the layout for the levels and forwarded the smaller file to Blues.

Blues was confused once he accepted the file transfer and opened them up. He quickly realized they were floor plans, and the realization they were two levels in the Tower followed soon after. It actually took him a few moments longer to realize _why_ X would be forwarding this to him, and his confusion actually deepened for a few moments before bleeding out to a touched feeling, though the echo of confusion still remained there, in the back of his mind. X was giving them their own levels?

'_What's wrong?_' X sent, his eyes widening just a touch as he turned to look at Blues, feeling the hint of conflict in Blues' link, hearing it in the Harmony. Had he done wrong by offering the levels to them without saying something beforehand?

Blues was silent for a few moments, inwardly staring at the maps, though his 'gaze' was a bit blank, like he wasn't even comprehending what he'd just been handed, what he'd just been offered. The touched feeling added a warm undertone to his feeling, even as the confusion and conflict remained steady. _'Nothing's wrong…'_ Blues trailed off for a moment, collecting himself (or trying to) and reaching out for what, exactly to _say_. Finally, '_Thank you, this is…I appreciate it.'_

X smiled then. '_You're as much a part of this city as the rest of us. I can't _not_ give you all a place to stay,_' and part of him hoped that Blues understood that the offer extended out to the Robot Masters they'd still not been introduced to.

As an afterthought, he checked the floor beneath the two levels he'd given to the Robot Masters and, finding it equally unused, submitted an administrative lock on the trio of levels. He recalled that Rock had mentioned before, when they were discussing X's serial (or the lack thereof), that the main numbers had ended at eighty. Hopefully, the ninety rooms available between the three floors would be enough.

Blues sent something of an affectionate feeling over their link, though it was muted as all of his other emotions, as though he kept a static barrier up for privacy's sake. Rock was looking to Blues now, querying him for data, and Blues forwarded the floor plans to the other Robot Masters. Perhaps they should go there next and get situated, then begin with improvements to the city. Oh, that reminded him, '_You asked that I come up with an…edit…to the city's seal to represent us_.' And he sent a file over to X, a slight smirk evident over the link and on his face.

The minute X opened the file, he couldn't help the laugh, even if he was able to restrict the outburst to little more than a halting snort of amusement. "I'm going to have to make sure the gold border can actually show up against that," he said, a soft lilt to his voice.

Ice was grinning widely as Rock actually giggled a little bit, the image file open on his end as well.

Blues' smirk widened, though it didn't graduate to being a full-on smile, "I thought it appropriate." The seal had been recolored a deep gold, the same color as his scarf.

"It is," and X considered the design a moment longer. "How would each of you prefer your badge? The sooner they're made or added to your clothes or armor, the sooner you'll be able to get into the city areas without clearance issues."

"We can probably just weld it in place," Metal said, gesturing toward his chest armor. All of the Wilybots had hardened metal chestplates, whereas Elec and Ice's armor was more of a deceptively durable cloth, able to block blows and projectiles, though it didn't afford the same kind of protection as outright armor did.

"I think the rest of us should use badges or pins, then," Blues said thoughtfully, considering Rock. Even in full armor, neither he nor Rock had a chestplate to weld it to and honestly, Blues was not getting anything added to his helmet, boots, or gauntlets, thank you very much.

"I'm _not_ wearing anything that isn't already part of my damn armor," Forte snapped, partially at Metal, mostly at Blues.

"If you do that, then you'll need an escort in the city," Blues said as Metal shook his head and crossed his arms. "I don't mind bringing you along everywhere I go, Forte," and while Blues' voice sounded earnest, his feeling over the Harmony wasn't quite so innocent.

"I thought the damn thing was for me to be going places and fixing the human's shit," Forte said. "I'm not fixing shit, so why the fuck do I need the thing anyway? 'Sides, why the hell would I put up wearing something that basically says I'm your gofer?"

A slightly agitated feeling resonated across the link between X and Blues, and the android looked to his eldest brother. '_Is he always in such a foul mood?_'

"Because you _are_ my gofer, Forte." Blues leaned back in his chair again, "Times change, and so do people. This is the way things are." Whether they liked it or not. '_He's agitated, but his programming is an attempt by Wily to circumvent a unit's desire to be Mastered, so Forte is constantly in an internal tug-of-war with himself. Reassurances only make him bristle and spit, especially if he thinks he knows what he's doing. And he thinks he always knows what he's doing. If he becomes a problem, I will correct his behavior._'

"Like hell I am!" Forte said, heading for the door. "I don't have to deal with this degrading shit."

X frowned at the unit, but chose to ignore the Wilybot in favor of getting the ten emblems ordered.

The Robot Masters watched Forte storm from the room and several moments after the unit disappeared, Metal sighed and started after him. The last thing they needed was Forte taking his frustration out on the building itself or worse, the next unit he came across.

"He'll settle," Quick said, tilting his head, his gaze still on the door. What he left unsaid was that Forte would either settle down on his own terms or be made to.

"It's not as though he's required for maintenance on the city; if anything, he'd be assisting another unit," Blues remarked, his head tilted to look back to the assembled Wilybots. Enker and Forte both were young, but Forte was by far more rebellious. Either of them would be good to assist, but he wouldn't land a whole project in their laps, not yet.

"It's still surprising," X said, "to see him act the way he does. Although not as…vocally demonstrative, Zero seems to have much the same temperament when he's angry," though, as he had done earlier, Zero tended to find a reasonable way of venting. Zero's frustrations, at least, were taking out in training simulations. "That being said, we should probably head back to my quarters for the time being. It'll be an hour or so before the badges arrive and I'd rather not idle about here."


End file.
